Time Zone Localizations

[Mark Davis]

Thanks for your feedback.

> Bouvet Island - an uninhabited volcanic island, almost entirely
...
> Etc/GMT{[+-]N} are just for fixed GMT offsets; they don't correspond to
> countries.

Yes, we realize that Bouvet Island and Heard Island and McDonald Islands are
completely obscure places; it is more for a matter of API/testing completeness.
Understood that Etc/GMT... don't correspond to countries. But in an API and for
translation, it is useful to have everything attached to a country, even if it
is a pseudo-country. That's why the suggestion in the document is to use ZZ for
them, which is a private-use ISO country code, which can be translated as "no
country".

As to Yugoslavia, that is a real mess, because the ISO committee just doesn't
care about stability of identifiers. You can have a database set up with
someone's country of birth stored as CS. All of a sudden by some whim of ISO,
that data is invalidated. More on that at
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-positions.html#2stability.

> Asia/Riyadh{87,88,89}: Saudi Arabia, SA - those are historical, from
> an era when Saudi Arabia used solar time, and apply only to Riyadh
> (and, if you're really fussy, to a particular location in Riyadh, I
> guess), so they're not appropriate for Saudi Arabia as a whole.  I
> don't know what names you'd give them.
> ...
> WET, CET, MET, and EET "are for backward compatibility with older
> versions"; various Europe/XXX rules should presumably be used instead -
> I guess you could pick cities for each of them.

For these, I guess my recommendation would be to not bother translating them at
all -- they are all compatibility orphans, one wouldn't encourage their use.

Mark
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Guy Harris" <guy at alum.mit.edu>
To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis at jtcsv.com>
Cc: <tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov>
Sent: Thu, 2004 Jun 10 18:11
Subject: Re: Time Zone Localizations


>
> On Jun 10, 2004, at 12:04 PM, Mark Davis wrote:
>
> > I'd very much appreciate any feedback on the proposal.
>
> Some of the countries listed as missing zones are:
>
> Bouvet Island - an uninhabited volcanic island, almost entirely
> covered by glaciers, controlled by Norway, and designated as a nature
> reserve, according to
>
> http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bv.html
>
> I don't know if the automated meteorological station on the island
> cares about time zones or not.
>
> Heard Island and McDonald Islands - uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic
> islands now controlled by Australia, designated as a nature preserve,
> according to
>
> http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/hm.html
>
> They don't even mention any automated meteorological stations, just
> seals and birds.
>
> Yugoslavia - it's now Serbia and Montenegro.  Europe/Belgrade is the
> correct zone for it.
>
> Some of the time zones listed as missing countries are:
>
> Europe/Belgrade: Serbia and Montenegro, which has the ISO 3166-1
> Alpha-2 code CS, according to
>
> http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/01whats-new/2003
> -07-23_statement_cs.html
>
> Asia/Riyadh{87,88,89}: Saudi Arabia, SA - those are historical, from
> an era when Saudi Arabia used solar time, and apply only to Riyadh
> (and, if you're really fussy, to a particular location in Riyadh, I
> guess), so they're not appropriate for Saudi Arabia as a whole.  I
> don't know what names you'd give them.
>
> Etc/GMT{[+-]N} are just for fixed GMT offsets; they don't correspond to
> countries.
>
> WET, CET, MET, and EET "are for backward compatibility with older
> versions"; various Europe/XXX rules should presumably be used instead -
> I guess you could pick cities for each of them.
>
>