[wp-polyglots] Continents and cities for translation

[Naoko McCracken]

I got replies back from Olson DB ML members.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/2769/focus=2770

In summary, the names in the database are the way it is on purpose,
and if that's a problem it should be handled by WordPress.
I don't think it's a critical issue and probably not worth spending too much
time at the moment, but I'll submit a trac ticket.

There was another person who sent me a direct email also.
His points are similar to Scott who sent a reply to the mailing list.

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One thing to remember is that the Olson strings are not *primarily*
designed to be human-readable, but rather to be usable in Unix. The
*displayed* strings can and often should be independent of those. (The
primary public project that concerns itself with displayable names is
the CLDR, http://cldr.unicode.org/ hosted at the Unicode site.)

As for including countries/cities, usually Olson does not do so. They do
for those few places only because the locations would be ambiguous
without them.

1. It includes duplicates primarily for backward compatibility. Choose
whichever you consider more appropriate.

2. Not typos, but munging to get them within the 14-character limit. Do
expand them to full form.

3. It's also acceptable to write "Canberra" instead of either "ACT" or
its spelled-out form.

4. Again, backward compatibility is paramount in the Olson database's
thinking.

5. Central Western is a tiny zone on the border between SA and WA, and
actually maintains time halfway between them (in the absence of Summer
Time, which it observes on the same schedule as SA. UCT is just in for
some kind of compatibility.

J Andrew Lipscomb
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Naoko McCracken