[tz] Scheduling - use case for acronyms

Tobias Conradi tobias.conradi at gmail.com
Tue Apr 2 20:01:39 UTC 2013


On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:37 PM,  <random832 at fastmail.us> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013, at 15:11, Philip Newton wrote:
>> On 2 April 2013 19:42, Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Exactly, and that would be communicated how, in a brief manner - as
>> > Mark used in "Mondays at 8:00 PT"
>>
>> On the other hand, if the meeting took place in Berlin, some would say
>> "Mondays at 8:00 CET" while others would say "an Montagen um 8:00
>> MEZ".
>>
>> Which is a case for placing such time zone abbreviations in
>> localisation frameworks such as CLDR rather than in the tz database.
>
> Yes, it is.
To what ID in the IANA time zone database would a localization
database connect to?

> And, in fact, there are time zone abbreviations in CLDR.

> Metazones, for those who don't already know, are things that group zones
> that are "the same timezone"
Can you point to a definition?

> (e.g. the two dozen or so U.S. and Canada
> -05:00 EST/-04:00 EDT zones are all "America_Eastern", your
> CET/MEZ/whatever are all "Europe_Central", etc) together, and are the
> key used to look up the localized timezone names and abbreviations. They
> include a standard and daylight offset, and of course a name, but _not_
> the question of whether DST is used at all, or what the specific
> changeover dates for it are.
>
> The data is at
> http://unicode.org/repos/cldr/trunk/common/supplemental/metaZones.xml,
<timezone type="Africa/Algiers">
<usesMetazone to="1977-10-20 23:00" mzone="Europe_Western"/>
<usesMetazone to="1979-10-25 23:00" from="1977-10-20 23:00"
mzone="Europe_Central"/>
<usesMetazone to="1981-05-01 00:00" from="1979-10-25 23:00"
mzone="Europe_Western"/>
<usesMetazone from="1981-05-01 00:00" mzone="Europe_Central"/>
</timezone>

Looks like partial duplication of IANA data:
ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/africa
Zone	Africa/Algiers
0:00	Algeria	WE%sT	1981 May
1:00	-	CET

> Really, metazone specification itself seems like it _should_ be the
> domain of tz rather than CLDR.
>But it would require an incompatible
> extension to the syntax of the timezone source files.

Something close might be there if the acronyms would be selected
differently. E.g. using:

https://tango.info/wiki/Internationalized_time_point_unique_time_zone_abbreviations

EUCT (English: CET, German MEZ)
EUCDT (English: CEST, German MESZ)

AUCT (English: ACST)
AUCDT (English: ACDT)

USCT (English: CST)
USCDT (English: CDT)

IDET (IANA-English: EIT, Indonesian: WIT !!! )
IDWT (IANA-English: WIT !!!, Indonesian: WIB)

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/


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