[cholindo]

> Time Zones often have a "friendly name" in the format Continent/City|Island

Continent/City are not friendly names, they are political boundaries that gice more precision. For example, CET covers many countries that might decide to stop applying DST at different points in time. If you store CET in your database you won't know if you need to apply CEST or not. This is why you always need the Continent/City form if you want to be future proof (and past proof)

[Denvercoder9]

If you want to be future proof, you need to store locations, not timezone identifiers. The timezone database does not claim that its currently defined timezones are controlled by a single entity (i.e. one timezone can span multiple governments with timekeeping authority), nor could it possibly guarantee that in the face of changing borders and laws.

[midasuni]

Time in the U.K. is europe/london. It’s entirely possible in the future that outlying Scottish islands may decide to keep DST while the rest of the country goes to year round daylight saving.

You can’t always be future proof.

[cholindo]

good to know, thanks

[kodra]

Political friendliness (n.)