title: Creating a user-friendly list of timezones for user-preferences
body: <p>Below is a snippet of the list of timezones returned from java (I've printed the timezone offset, timezone ID, and long name, using JodaTime).</p>
  
  <pre><code>(GMT-10:00) HST, Hawaii Standard Time     
  (GMT-10:00) Pacific/Apia, -10:00
  (GMT-10:00) Pacific/Fakaofo, Tokelau Time
  (GMT-10:00) Pacific/Honolulu, Hawaii Standard Time
  (GMT-10:00) Pacific/Johnston, Hawaii Standard Time
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the difference between <strong>HST</strong>, <strong>Pacific/Honolulu</strong>, and <strong>Pacific/Johnston</strong>, for example? They all seem to use <strong>Hawaii Standard Time</strong>, why are there 3 entries in the database?</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>My ultimate goal is to just create a list of timezones for user preferences in a web app.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>If I use all of the timezones from the tzDatabase the list is long and appears to have effective duplicates (example above). I could just list unique long-form-names such as "Hawaii Standard Time", but then I need to decide how to map it to any one of the timezones that use that same long name.</p>
  
  <p>What do other people do in this case? How do you create a nice user-friendly list of timezones and map them to their relevant java TimeZone?</p>