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

[Lester Caine]

Tobias Conradi wrote:
> 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.

Currently having increasing fun with an insane attempt to restrict names to some 
simple 'English' subset's of characters in a couple of other areas, I think the 
discussion should be on ALLOWING the full Unicode character set. This is the 
21st century and many more users do not even speak English!

And I am English and only speak English ...

Personally I could make a case for using ISO 3166 country codes and perhaps 
augmenting that with an area code, so that in addition to English versions of 
zone names, local translation tables could be introduced in a standard way? But 
this probably a separate project to the time zone data :(

> Some environments don't allow "/". Since "/" is part of the zone name,
> a replacement may be needed.

The use of "/" makes perfect sense since it groups zones into natural folders 
and sub-folders. It's up to you code to decide what to do with it.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk//
Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php