How about adding UN/LOCODE in zone.tab?

[Ian Abbott]

On 04/02/11 16:00, yoshito_umaoka at us.ibm.com wrote:
> Unicode CLDR defines locale identifiers based on BCP47 language tag
> (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt)
> BCP47 provides a mechanism for extending language tags for use in
> various applications.
> 
> We recently published RFC6067 (http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6067/)
> to allocate BCP47 extension letter "u" for the use of Unicode Locale
> Identifiers. Unicode Locale Identifier has its own subtag for specifying
> time zone IDs. Unfortunately, zone IDs in the tz database cannot be used
> in language tag because each subtag in extension must be 2 to 8
> alpha/numeric characters. For this reason, we defined "short ID" for
> zones based on UN/LOCODE [http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/]. Most of
> exemplar cities by the tz database are covered by LOCODE, with small
> exceptions.
> 
> For example, zone "America/New_York" is represented by "usnyc". The
> mapping data is provided in the file -
> http://www.unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/common/bcp47/timezone.xml
> 
> With the extension, you can exchange locale data including time zone
> information with a language tag - for example, "en-US-u-tz-usnyc"
> 
> I'm wondering if zone.tab can include LOCODE - for example, LOCODE
> consist from ISO3166 2-letter country code + 3-letter location code.
> 
> #locode        coordinates        TZ                        comments
> AD ALV        +4230+00131        Europe/Andorra
> AE DXB        +2518+05518        Asia/Dubai
> AF KBL        +3431+06912        Asia/Kabul
> AG ANU        +1703-06148        America/Antigua
> ...
> 
> -Yoshito Umaoka (ICU / CLDR project)

Including LOCODE in zone.tab may or may not be a good idea, but I'm
trying hard to think why you'd want to encode a time zone in a language tag.

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
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