What does US/Pacific or Asia/Tokyo timezone definition called?

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I am writing a documentation that requires user to follow this timezone standard (e.g. US/Pacific or Asia/Tokyo or UTC), how do I say it?

timezone standards
2 Answers

There are several terms that are acceptable. I will list them in order of my preferences:

  • IANA Time Zone Identifier
  • IANA Time Zone Name
  • TZ Database Time Zone
  • TZ Name
  • Olson Time Zone
  • ZoneInfo Name

Most of these are de facto terms. The only standard term is "TZ Name" because that's how it's stated in RFC 6557. Though keep in mind that RFC 6557 only formally defines the procedures for maintaining the time zone database, it doesn't provide a hard specification for the data itself.

The theory file in the tz database itself should probably be the authoritative source, but it intermixes the terms "timezone identifier" and "timezone name", and sometimes just says "timezone" or "time zone". (It should be two words, IMHO - not one.)

For me, I'll keep using "IANA Time Zone Identifier" wherever possible. I like the term "identifier" rather than "name" because it makes it more clear that they are string IDs that can be used as keys in databases or in APIs - whereas a "name" is often something that needs to be translated to a specific language.

Howard's Answer also gives some good background about some of the other challenges, in that forks of the tzdb could be using their own terminology someday.

user_6348240

These timezone names are associated with the IANA Time Zone Database. This database (and associated software) has become a de-facto standard across most computing platforms over the past few decades.

Your documentation could reference this established internet authority. Note that this is a "living database" which changes with time. It includes a version number should your documentation wish to reference a specific version.

Unfortunately the IANA Time Zone Database has recently forked, and at this time it is not clear what impact this will have. Here is the fork, which also includes a rationale for the fork:

https://github.com/JodaOrg/global-tz

So you also have the option of having your documentation reference this fork. The fork uses the same time zone names, but distinguishes itself with a version number derived from but distinct from the IANA version number.

user_5769110
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