[tz] Proposal to change Macquarie Island to be Australian territory

[Guy Harris]

On Apr 18, 2013, at 12:43 PM, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps both databases should be using the same LOCODE-derived identifiers as the "official" identifiers, with all the region/city names used as legacy backwards-compatibility names?  Using those as the "official" identifiers has the advantages that:
>> 
>>        1) they look like line noise to humans,
> 
> UN LOCODEs are structured and not noise to all humans.

OK, "look like line noise to most humans".

The point is that they're a lot more cryptic, which I consider a feature, not a bug, for the reasons listed.

> For US people:
> USNYC, USPDX, what may these refer to?

USNYC might be obvious; USPDX, perhaps not so much if you're not familiar with "PDX" for Portland, Oregon (and if USPDX *isn't* Portland, that might surprise a *number* of USans).

>> so UIs for setting the zone will perhaps make an effort to do something better than offer you a choice of zone identifiers or zone identifiers with underscores replaced by spaces;
> 
> Programmers that feel like doing so can do so already.

Yes, they *can*, but I don't know who other than Apple *have* done so already.  Making the identifiers more cryptic might light a bit of a fire under more developers.

>>        2) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong City was used;
> 
> An often mentioned case is Asia/Shanghai where people request
> Asia/Beijing - with UN LOCODEs that would be CNSHA vs. CNBJS

That's one of the cases I was thinking of (the other is Kolkata vs. Mumbai vs. Delhi).

>>        3) they look like line noise to humans, so perhaps people won't get quite as bent out of shape because The Wrong Region was used;
> 
> The first two letters of UN LOCODEs are the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes,
> likely not noise to all humans.

"CH"?  That's China, right? :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

(Yes, I know why "CH" was chosen for Switzerland.  It's still probably not intuitively obvious to many that "CH" is Switzerland and "CN" is China.)