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: <[email protected]>
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?
