[tz] Timezone selectors (was RES: Timezone for Brazil)

[Guy Harris]

On Oct 10, 2023, at 2:23 PM, Doug Ewell via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> This would be very helpful for applications like ours, which asks users to select a time zone which is then transmitted to an external device that requires a tzid. Thanks to CLDR, the user gets to choose a human-readable name instead of a raw tzid, but still has to choose from among many time zones with the same base offset.

Are they being requested to select their *own* timezone or to select some *other* timezone?

If it's their own timezone, can your application query the system to determine it?

> Remember that most users are not as knowledgeable about time zones as we are. In an informal poll of co-workers about the list of ~425 zones, some thought they should pick the zone corresponding to the city physically closest to them, e.g. America/Detroit in preference to America/New_York.

Most users should never be exposed to the existence of "America/Detroit" or "America/New_York" or "America/Sao_Paolo" or "America/Noronha" or "Asia/Shanghai" or "Europe/Berlin" or....

But presumably the list of cities is *not* just the list of cities used as LOCATIONs in tzdb IDs, so they can choose a city that's *neither* Detroit *nor* New York.  (In macOS, I can choose the city in which I live, although, alas, I can't choose Weed.)