Justin,
GMT+1 is DST aware... UTC is not.
From the point of usability you have only a few options:
* Display the original timezone name... it is the same in every language
and does not need a translation
* Display only the hour-difference... most users which are able to use
computers are also aware of the hour difference they belong to GMT
* Display cities... this integrates the problem that you need all selected
cities translated to all 128 languages. Or you display the city name always
in original language which could be irritating to users
From simplicity and what I've seen in other applications in multiple
businesses I would only show the full timezone name.
Greetings
Thomas Weidner, I18N Team Leader, Zend Framework
http://www.thomasweidner.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Hendrickson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Thomas Weidner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: [fw-general] Timezone recommendations?
You're right, I have no idea how I want to display it. Are there any
usability studies, opinions, preferences or recommendations? I'd like to
hear them since I have little experience in this area.
My hope was that Zend_Locale had an implementation of the preferred way of
doing it, which is why I was confused by the variety of methods and lack
of
a clear answer to my problem.
I'd like to make things as easy on myself and the users as possible when
selecting their timezone. It's my understanding that the area/location
"timezones" are DST-aware and respect changes made by governing bodies, so
using them seems to make the most sense. Since GMT+/-# aren't DST-aware,
I'd
like to avoid them.
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 2:25 PM, Thomas Weidner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hy Justin,
first you should ask yourself the question what you really want to be
displayed.
A timezone itself can not be translated because it's worldwide the
same...
GMT+1 is always GMT+1, in every language.
Also US/Arizona is always this timezone and so on...
Reading your post I got the feeling that you do not know yourself what
you
want.
You are speaking of timezones (which is worldwide the same).
You are speaking of cities (which have nothing to do with timezones).
You are speaking of Windows to Timezone conversion (which is only
relevant
for people working with Windows timezones).
You are speaking of different results using different timezones (which is
logical when the locale differs).
So first please go into yourself and think about WHAT do you want your
users to be displayed. When you have cleared what you really want we will
look into what is possible and what is not.
Greetings
Thomas Weidner, I18N Team Leader, Zend Framework
http://www.thomasweidner.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Hendrickson" <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <fw-general@lists.zend.com>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:10 PM
Subject: [fw-general] Timezone recommendations?
I'm trying to create a list of translated timezones, but I'm finding the
> variety of options pretty overwhelming.
>
> I wanted to avoid having to store GMT offsets and DST flags, and
> instead
> store PHP area/location values (
> http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php)
> which I could fetch via timezone_identifiers_list() (
> http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.timezone-identifiers-list.php),
> but
> it
> seems to be pretty impractical to display that entire list to end
> users.
> There's a lot of ambiguity in list as well. For example, US/Arizona and
> America/Phoenix; America/Havana and Cuba; UTC and UCT. Additionally,
> PHP
> doesn't offer any translations so there was no way I was going to do
> that
> myself.
>
> I thought I'd have a little more luck using Zend_Locale getting
> translations, so I looked at the CityToTimezone list. For some reason,
> Zend_Locale_Data::getList('en', 'CityToTimezone') only returns three
> results. Other locales returned various different counts (es: 83, el:
> 293),
> so I'm a bit confused how to use it. I also tried the WindowsToTimezone
> list
> which seems promising as a compromise of completeness vs usability, but
> there were ambiguous entries (US Mountain and Mountain) in the list and
> none
> of the results were coming back translated.
>
> I tried search Google for a bit, but I wasn't able to find any
> recommendations or guidelines for timezone selection, so I'm at a dead
> end.
> Any suggestions?
>
>
