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

[Steffen Daode Nurpmeso]

Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi at gmail.com> wrote:

 |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.

I referred to the portable character set of The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7 / IEEE Std 1003.1™-2008
(http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/):

    Base Definitions
      3. Definitions
        3.170 Filename
          A name consisting of 1 to {NAME_MAX} bytes used to name
          a file. The characters composing the name may be selected
          from the set of all character values excluding the <slash>
          character and the null byte. The filenames dot and dot-dot
          have special meaning. A filename is sometimes referred
          to as a "pathname component".

        3.276 Portable Filename Character Set

          A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
          a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
          0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . _ -

          The last three characters are the <period>,
          <underscore>, and <hyphen> characters, respectively.

      4. General Concepts
        4.6 Filenames
        4.7 Filename Portability
        4.12 Pathname Resolution

      13. Headers
        limits.h - implementation-defined constants
          {NAME_MAX}
            Maximum number of bytes in a filename (not including the
            terminating null).
            Minimum Acceptable Value: {_POSIX_NAME_MAX}
          {_POSIX_NAME_MAX}
            Maximum number of bytes in a filename (not including
            the terminating null).
            Value: 14

In this regard there was an interesting thread in the Austin
group:

  https://www.opengroup.org/sophocles/show_mail.tpl?CALLER=show_archive.tpl&source=L&listname=austin-group-l&id=17346

    As has already been noted, any attempt to make <slash> and
    NULL valid characters in a filename will never be accepted as
    a change to the POSIX standards and the Single UNIX
    Specifications.  That part of this bug is rejected.  The other
    part of this bug is the handling of some characters in
    filenames.

--steffen
Forza Figa!