<font face="times new roman,serif">> on the contrary</font><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">First, I wasn't saying that the TZDB identifiers were commonly used externally; they are not. Nobody writes "I'll meet you at 12:30 Europe/Paris".</font></div>
<div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">Secondly, I said the "vast majority". Some of the abbreviations are quite familiar, at least for those familiar with the timezones in question, because they match what is in common use. People living in the US, or English speakers outside that have a lot to do with the US would recognize "CST". Tell a Japanese "I'll send the message at 12:30 AMST" and see what he or she understands. In CLDR we ended up dropping almost all abbreviations, because people (whether familiar with the timezones in question or not) didn't recognize them. It's not as if the TZDB is using the wrong abbreviation (at least for English), it's most often that there just isn't an accepted abbreviation in a given language for a particular timezone.</font></div>
<div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="'times new roman', serif"><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><div>
<span><hr></span></div></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><a href="https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033" target="_blank">Mark</a></div>
<div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><i><br></i></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">
<i>— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —</i></div></font><div><div><font face="'times new roman', serif"><i><span style="font-style:normal"><i></i></span><i></i></i></font></div></div><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 11:26 AM, David Patte <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dpatte@relativedata.com" target="_blank">dpatte@relativedata.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
On the contrary, I think people are far more familiar with their
timezone abbreviations that they are with the olson timezone region
names. <br><div class="im">
<br>
On 2012-06-06 13:36, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
<blockquote type="cite"><font face="times new roman,serif">I think it is a
waste of time to worry about the timezone abbreviations in the
tzdatabase.</font>
<div><font face="times new roman,serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font face="times new roman,serif"> Despite being around for
years, the vast majority of the ones that are in the files are
not familiar to people in the timezones in question, and are
thus essentially useless. Moreover, they are only in a single
language (English) and script (Latin). Time spend on talking
about them would be far better spent doing something
productive.</font></div>
</blockquote>
<br>
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