[tz] Proposal to deprecate "." and "-" in zone names

Tobias Conradi tobias.conradi at gmail.com
Thu May 24 23:27:00 UTC 2012


On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Zefram <zefram at fysh.org> wrote:
> Tobias Conradi wrote:
>>@"-"
>>Reduce number of possible variations. Avoid discussions about names as
>
> Seems better not to change the existing ones
It would be only three extra entries in the backward file.

>>Some environments don't allow "/". Since "/" is part of the zone name,
>>a replacement may be needed.
>
> If you really want to use a complete zone name
> as a single filename (i.e., a name that can appear in a single-level
> directory), then you need to do some mapping, but it's not our job to
> cater to that usage.
It doesn't matter whether it is anyone's job.

I am here to improve usability of the IANA time zone database.

Other people already invent new names because in their systems the
IANA time zone names are not sufficient.

E.g. CLDR has created UN/LOCODE based codes:
http://cldr.unicode.org/development/development-process/design-proposals/bcp47-mapping

Some of these insufficiencies can be easily removed.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/syndata.html#q4 says
"In CSS2, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in
selectors) can contain only the characters [A-Za-z0-9] and ISO 10646
characters 161 and higher, plus the hyphen (-); they cannot start with
a hyphen or a digit. They can also contain escaped characters and any
ISO 10646 character as a numeric code (see next item). For instance,
the identifier "B&W?" may be written as "B\&W\?" or "B\26 W\3F"."

To have / or \ in zone names needs escaping in CSS2 according to the
above, if one wants to use the names for classes or ids in CSS.

By using only [A-Za-z0-9] in name components and "/" as component
separator, the IANA time zone database would allow easy transformation
from IANA time zone names into class names or ids and backward.

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/


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