Hello, I am writing to you to request a small but significant change to the area options that are currently listed in the database. Recently I used software that uses the database for the area and location information and I was initially very puzzled when trying to find Canada. America was there but no other country in the North or South American continents. After a little research I realized that the database has America represent both. The trouble I have is that America is also a well used name for the United States and represents the name of a country rather than the two continents. I will be honest that it definitely rubbed the wrong way to have to choose America to find a city in Canada and I would also bet that outside of the US it would not be intuitive to choose America when looking for other countries within North and South America. To that end, I think it would be a great improvement to update the area to "Americas" or "the Americas" so that it was much clearer that it represents more than just one country. Thank you -- Andrea Boyle
On 2/2/21 12:41 PM, Andrea Boyle wrote:
it would be a great improvement to update the area to "Americas"
Although I considered doing that in 1993 when I added those names to tzdb, I went with "America" as it was shorter and the original (circa 1507) sense of the word "America" covers both North and South America. We now have almost 30 years' worth of software etc. using "America", and changing the name now would surely be more trouble than it's worth.
On Feb 2, 2021, at 12:41 PM, Andrea Boyle <andrea0099@gmail.com> wrote:
I am writing to you to request a small but significant change to the area options that are currently listed in the database. Recently I used software that uses the database for the area and location information and I was initially very puzzled when trying to find Canada.
If the software shows you the tzdb region names, it doesn't have a very good interface for selecting a tzdb region. The best interface I've seen for that is the interface in macOS, where you have a map from which you can select a region (a vertical band on the map), and an editable combo box that offers a choice of "nearest cities" and lets you enter a city to search for it. It does *not* show the tzdb region names - it determines the appropriate region based on the chosen city. (It also offers the option to let the system automatically choose the tzdb region based on where your system is located - and to update that as your system moves. For Macs, the system location is generally determined from Wi-Fi access points found nearby.) At a minimum, software should use the exemplar cities from the Unicode CLDR: http://cldr.unicode.org If they can find additional cities in the tzdb regions, that's even better. (And, as Paul noted, the *negative* effects of that change wouldn't necessarily be as small as the change might appear to be.)
participants (3)
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Andrea Boyle -
Guy Harris -
Paul Eggert