[tz] Proposal: Sections for different kinds of backward links

[Gilmore Davidson]

> On 9 Nov 2021, at 21:30, Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> 
> Note that in order for this change to be useful, the section names
> need to be considered part of the source file API, and maintained over
> time.
> 

Agreed—if any kind of division is introduced like this, it needs to be consistently machine-readable.

I’m interested in the discussions around the different kind of Links, and what counts as “deprecated”. My angle comes from lurking in the bug tracker for the Moment Timezone JS library. Users there have raised several issues regarding Zone or Link names that we on the list consider deprecated (or “best to be avoided”), but have no formal interface to indicate it.

Some examples include:

Provide a way to determine whether a timezone is deprecated. (https://github.com/moment/moment-timezone/issues/956)
Questions about US/Pacific-New (before it was removed completely).
Confusion over Asia/Calcutta vs Asia/Kolkata, but a lot of that is caused by different web browsers returning different values.

I also see that the PHP documentation has to maintain a page listing zone identifiers that shouldn’t be used: https://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.others.php
I’m assuming that it would be more desirable for PHP to have a software API to indicate the “unwanted" nature of those identifiers. (I also assume Derick will chime in to correct my assumption.)

Cheers,
Gil
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20211109/73845bde/attachment.html>