From:             chimel31 at live dot fr
Operating system: Windows XP
PHP version:      Irrelevant
Package:          Date/time related
Bug Type:         Bug
Bug description:Messed up timezone names

Description:
------------
Descriptions for timezones do not allow users to select their own
timezone.
For instance, there are 160 timezones to choose from for America.
None contains the standard timezone that users expect and know, like
Pacific Time. Instead, they are sorted by continent and cities!
Why you would expect people to select Anchorage when they live in San
Francisco or Seattle is a mystery.

There is absolutely nothing to allow the user to select the proper timezone
quickly, you have to browse all 160 of them to spot the ones that match
your timezone offset, pick one and hope that city from a different state is
indeed in the timezone your city belongs to.

I suggest:

1) The country US or USA be added between the continent and city name.
That would allow users to quickly sort and select the correct time zone.

2) If official timezone names exist, like Pacific Time, these should be
present in the timezone description,  not just a city name from a foreign
state. That does not help at all.

3) Timezones should be sortable by their GMT offset too. The current one
dimension list is just not good enough. It should have a separate numeric
field for the offset, not an offset in text format that's appended to the
timezone description and is of absolutely no use for sorting. And the
timezone library should come with some code to, to allow users to sort
timezones on either the description or the GMT offset.

I appreciate that there are more timezones now, it's probably more detailed
and fits more precise areas, but it came at a price if it makes the
timezone hard and time-consuming to select. Something has been lost in the
way, there was no need to reinvent the wheel, just to improve on it.


-- 
Edit bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=64958&edit=1
-- 
Try a snapshot (PHP 5.4):   
https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=trysnapshot54
Try a snapshot (PHP 5.3):   
https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=trysnapshot53
Try a snapshot (trunk):     
https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=trysnapshottrunk
Fixed in SVN:               https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=fixed
Fixed in release:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=alreadyfixed
Need backtrace:             https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=needtrace
Need Reproduce Script:      https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=needscript
Try newer version:          https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=oldversion
Not developer issue:        https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=support
Expected behavior:          https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=notwrong
Not enough info:            
https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=notenoughinfo
Submitted twice:            
https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=submittedtwice
register_globals:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=globals
PHP 4 support discontinued: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=php4
Daylight Savings:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=dst
IIS Stability:              https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=isapi
Install GNU Sed:            https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=gnused
Floating point limitations: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=float
No Zend Extensions:         https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=nozend
MySQL Configuration Error:  https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=64958&r=mysqlcfg

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