Corrections to timezone database

[Mark Davis]

> But I insist that there should be an entry "Asia/Beijing" first.
> "Beijing Time" is represented by Shanghai, which is a unacceptable
> situation.

As far as we are concerned, the tzid is simply an internal tag, marking a
region of the Earth that has the same timezone behavior, all the way back to
the point in time where timezones started to be used instead of solar time.
The name for that tzid may vary by language, and it should be the most
customary form for that language (or even country).

It is a bit like arguing that CN should not be the official ISO 3166 country
code for China, because it is not an acronym for the Chinese name for the
country. The common name is divorced from the particular combination of
letters used for the code. The code is an internal tag, which should be
represented with an appropriate string for whatever the user's language is.
The main purpose of the code is that it be well-defined and unique.

If Shanghai and Beijing ever had different timezone behavior, that would
warrant having a different tzid; otherwise it doesn't.

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Funda Wang" <fundawang at gmail.com>
To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis at jtcsv.com>
Cc: "Paul Eggert" <eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU>; "Tz (tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov)"
<tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov>
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 14:20
Subject: Re[2]: Corrections to timezone database


> Mark> I do want to call people's attention to the CLDR project work on
timezone
> Mark> identifiers (http://unicode.org/cldr/).
> Sounds interesting. But should I join this project as an individual?
>
> Mark> (All of this can be overridden by specific localizations for
generic,
> Mark> standard, or daylight names. So if the equivalent of "Beijing Time"
is what
> Mark> is customary in Chinese, we could use that.)
> I probably don't understand what you say. Do you mean that you would do
> following modification?:
>   Asia/Shanghai => 北京时间
>
> If all other countries will be using the country name, it would be fine
> that we use China(中国).
>
> But I insist that there should be an entry "Asia/Beijing" first.
> "Beijing Time" is represented by Shanghai, which is a unacceptable
> situation.
>