RE: 1st Working Draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization Published

At 20:00 04/04/08 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jungshik Shin [mailto:jshin@i18nl10n.com]
> > Sent: 10 October 2003 01:09

> >  In 14.1 Date & Time, it's adised that 'words for the month
> > be used and an example (02 mar 2004) is given. I'm not sure
> > of the wisdom of this.
> > For speakers of European languages, that may be a good
> > advice, but for East Asian users, that doesn't seem to as
> > good (and I'm not sure of other regions/languages). At the
> > minimum, YYYY-MM-DD format (as specified in ISO 8601) should
> > be mentioned as a rather universal and
> > culture/language-neutral alternative.
>
>We felt that YYYY-MM-DD format has a fairly technical bias, and is not
>always the preferred form for a particular locale, although it could be
>useful in some circumstances.  We also note that pages are in a given
>language most of the time, and one might generally expect month names to be
>recognised in most situations, though that might not hold for certain
>special types of reference page aimed at a reader who doesn't need to
>understand the language text. So we think the guidelines should say
>something like: consider YYYY-MM-DD, especially when dealing with an
>international audience, or use the month name if a local format is more
>appropriate.  (Of course, this doesn't apply in quite the same way for CJK,
>since the month name is a number plus character. That should be explained.)

As one of the originators and/or pushers for having a named month,
I have to apologize to Jungshik and others for not having thought about
the CJK case. I think the solution proposed by Richard ('month name', with
an explanation for the CJK case) is a step in the right direction.
But maybe we should word this more neutrally, e.g.

    Indicate the month in a way that clearly identifies it as a month.
      - In languages where month names are customarily used, use month names.
      - In other languages (e.g. Chinese/Japanese/Korean), use the month
        number with the character for 'month'.

Does this cover all languages, as far as we know, or are there
languages that don't fit in this pattern?
Please note that I wrote "month names are customarily used" rather
than "month names exist", because e.g. Japanese has traditional
words for months, but they are no longer in daily use.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Friday, 9 April 2004 03:13:29 UTC