Chinese timezones

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:21:24 -0400
    From:        "Andy Lipscomb" <AndyLipscomb at decosimo.com>
    Message-ID:  <E3827447A4261D4C80192E07BB7E649102438A39 at chaexc01.decosimo.local>

  | Perhaps a better term would be "historical" time zones.

No, time zones including historical information.   They're not obsolete.

  | This would in fact be a useful distinction, since only a relatively
  | small subset of the timezones are necessary for applications that
  | look only forward

That may be true, but ...

  | --these would be the first set to present to a user

That would be foolish.   Users typically select their timezone just once
(and certainly they should need to, assuming they don't relocate, and zones
don't split - both of which are fairly high visibility activities).
If the user selects a zone that seems to work just fine for most applications,
but mysteriously gives incorrect answers for that relatively small subset
(like anything that prints the modification time of a file that might
have been last modified in the past) then we have achieved a poor result.

It may be a bit harder to explain, and we may not yet have found the best
way to either do that, or allow users to select the correct zone, but doing
that additional work at the time when the user is consciously considering
the issue is almost certainly going to pay off in the long term.

kre