There are 29 countries that have multiple zones. If you show only modern zones, you have 99 different zones for those countries; if you show historic zones, you have 164, a considerable increase. For example, for the US you have the following, with a ';' between zones that are the same nowadays, and ';' between ones that are different. It clutters up the UI and adds more translation requirements if you need to distinguish non-modern zones. Pacific/Honolulu; America/Adak; America/Anchorage, America/Nome, America/Juneau, America/Yakutat; America/Los_Angeles; America/Phoenix; America/Denver, America/Boise; America/Chicago, America/North_Dakota/Center, America/Menominee; America/Indianapolis, America/Indiana/Knox, America/Indiana/Vevay, America/Indiana/Marengo; America/New_York, America/Kentucky/Monticello, America/Detroit, America/Louisville Note: we're not saying the modern equivalents must be identified; this is more a matter of setting priorities for translation. Mark __________________________________ http://www.macchiato.com ► शिष्यादिच्छेत्पराजयम् ◄ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> Cc: <tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov> Sent: Fri, 2004 Jun 11 12:41 Subject: Re: Time Zone Localizations
<<On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:49:03 -0700, "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> said:
[Text formatting recovered.]
Many (I would dare say the vast majority) of end users just don't care now that there was once a difference between Dawson, Whitehorse and Los Angeles. When they pick a timezone in some preferences dialog (on their machine, in a website preferences page, etc) they just want to see one choice for that zone, not three
There are really very few cases where you might give people multiple choices, having already selected a particular country or national region. In the tzsetup(8) user interface which I wrote, users must first select a region and then a "country" (scare quotes because they are actually selecting a 3166-2 code behind the scenes, but the interface doesn't tell them that). The US probably provides most of the complicated cases once you've gotten that far; few other countries have more than one historic zone for each existing modern zone. In any event, if the user has already selected a locale, then you should default to presenting only the time zones associated with the country or region identified by the locale, with an option to "see all". There is no need to identify "equivalent" time zones when most of them are already known to be largely irrelevant.
There is a separate localization issue that comes up when trying to answer the question, "What time is it in _____?". I don't know if the scope of your project extends to that question.
-GAWollman