I thought a bit about the problem of the explosion of time zone names, since we're looking at time zone rules for everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. What do people think about time zone names of the from MAJOR_REGION/COUNTRY/CITY, e.g.: Africa/Zimbabwe/Harare Asia/Afghanistan/Kabul Europe/Albania/Tirana North_America/US/Los_Angeles Pacific/Fiji/Suva The ``major regions'' would be continents (Africa, North_ and South_ America, Antarctica, Australia, Asia, Europe) and oceans (Antarctic, Artic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific). The ``minor regions'' would typically be countries. Only present-day English names for regions and cities would be used. The advantage of going to the detail of CITY is that we can use local mean time for times before standard time was introduced (e.g. before 1914 Jan 1 in Albania); this increases the accuracy of the database. Of course we should maintain links to traditional names like `Japan' and `US/Eastern' for backwards compatibility. Since I last wrote, I've coded up two sample countries. Asia/Afghanistan/Kabul needed just two lines of rules; Shanks says they've changed the rules only once since they adopted standard time in 1890. Europe/Albania/Tirana is a much more complicated 35-liner. Not only did it suffer the time zone vagaries of World War II, but also its dictatorship fiddled with the clocks seemingly at random between 1974 and 1984 before finally switching to the Polish rules. It looks like this will take some time.