[tz] Proposal to change Macquarie Island to be Australian territory
Guy Harris
guy at alum.mit.edu
Thu Apr 18 20:01:44 UTC 2013
On Apr 18, 2013, at 12:43 PM, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps both databases should be using the same LOCODE-derived identifiers as the "official" identifiers, with all the region/city names used as legacy backwards-compatibility names? Using those as the "official" identifiers has the advantages that:
>>
>> 1) they look like line noise to humans,
>
> UN LOCODEs are structured and not noise to all humans.
OK, "look like line noise to most humans".
The point is that they're a lot more cryptic, which I consider a feature, not a bug, for the reasons listed.
> For US people:
> USNYC, USPDX, what may these refer to?
USNYC might be obvious; USPDX, perhaps not so much if you're not familiar with "PDX" for Portland, Oregon (and if USPDX *isn't* Portland, that might surprise a *number* of USans).
>> so UIs for setting the zone will perhaps make an effort to do something better than offer you a choice of zone identifiers or zone identifiers with underscores replaced by spaces;
>
> Programmers that feel like doing so can do so already.
Yes, they *can*, but I don't know who other than Apple *have* done so already. Making the identifiers more cryptic might light a bit of a fire under more developers.
>> 2) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong City was used;
>
> An often mentioned case is Asia/Shanghai where people request
> Asia/Beijing - with UN LOCODEs that would be CNSHA vs. CNBJS
That's one of the cases I was thinking of (the other is Kolkata vs. Mumbai vs. Delhi).
>> 3) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong Region was used;
>
> The first two letters of UN LOCODEs are the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes,
> likely not noise to all humans.
"CH"? That's China, right? :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
(Yes, I know why "CH" was chosen for Switzerland. It's still probably not intuitively obvious to many that "CH" is Switzerland and "CN" is China.)
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