[tz] Time zone of Iceland in Africa?

[Guy Harris]

On Nov 9, 2023, at 10:19 PM, Brian Inglis via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> While this may be technically correct, this is jarring to anyone seeing it, and poor UX:

The *ideal* UX would never show tzids to any users other than nerds familiar with the tzdb, including the Theory page.

> linking zones not in geographical proximity across continents or oceans should never happen e.g. {Asia,Europe}/Istanbul makes sense, Atlantic/Reykjavik <-> Africa/Abidjan does not.

{Asia,Europe}/Istanbul makes sense because the Bosphorus 1) is considered a border between Europe and Asia and 2) runs through Istanbul, so Istanbul is in both continents.

Couple of other links that exist but that don't refer to the same city:

Europe/Berlin <-> Europe/Copenhagen refer to cities somewhat in geographical proximity (albeit separated by water), although they're ~400 km apart, and I think some complaints were made when Europe/Copenhagen was moved to backbone.

America/Panama <-> America/Coral_Harbour are nominally on the same continent, if you consider the Western Hemisphere to have one big continent and some islands, but "proximity" here is "only a little more than 6000 km apart".

So either 1) "geographical proximity" needs to be defined more precisely, 2) more criteria are needed for "don't link them", or 3) "don't show tzids to the majority of users".