[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

[Guy Harris]

On Feb 26, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:

> Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> And I'm not even convinced that users want to care about tzdb regions;
>> those regions don't completely correspond to, for example, what people
>> call "time zones" in the US, so "Mountain time" or "Mountain time zone"
>> doesn't correspond to the America/Denver tzdb region - Arizona is in the
>> "Mountain" time zone, but it hasn't done standard/summar time switching
>> since 1968, unlike other parts of that time zone.
>> 
>> What I suspect users want is to have clock time work appropriately for
>> their location; if doing so doesn't involve knowing or caring about the
>> details of the tzdb, so much the better.
> 
> Up to a point...
> 
> A common cause of significant confusion is when people are trying to
> organize meetings between people in multiple time zones. I think the
> confusion is due to poor calendaring data models which make it difficult
> to provide a user interface that illustrates what is going on.

	...

None of which appears to require that the *end users* - including the meeting organizer(s) - know or care about the details of the tzdb.  They may need to know that scheduling the meeting for thus-and-such a time in London means scheduling it for 03:00 at some other location, so, if they schedule for that time, somebody's going to have to wake up early or go to sleep late, but that's what the software would do.