Re: Date & number format

I always provide <select> elements for the day and month, and in some cases for 
the year (in cases where only a small set of years would be valid for the 
application in question). For the months I always use the names of the months 
in the year in question, rather than the number to again avoid ambiguity.

When outputting dates I use a long format with the name of the month and the 
year as a four-digit number. If I have to use a short form I use an extended 
ISO 8601 format (2003-12-05) since that is the international format and 
official date format in the United States, Canada, Australia, all of the 
European Union, much (all?) of East Asia and much of the rest of the world. 
It's also reasonably clear in those countries where it isn't much used in day-
to-day practice (whereas 05/12/2003 or 12/05/2003 are hopelessly ambiguous).

For phone numbers I ask for the full number including the + and consider it a 
validation error if it doesn't begin with a +, which catches cases where people 
unthinkingly type in their phone number with no code or with only the code for 
within their own country. The characters '-', '(', ')' and space are purely 
formatting characters in phone numbers, so validation should allow them to be 
used anywhere. All other characters should be rejected (for i18n there is an 
advantage in accepting other numeric characters, such as those used with 
Arabic, as numbers).

When outputting I would normally write with a hyphen after the national and 
local code like so: +353-1-XXXXXXX for a Dublin, Ireland number. But if I get a 
number broken up differently I just keep the formatting I received it in.

--
Jon Hanna                   | Toys and books
<http://www.hackcraft.net/> | for hospitals:
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Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 05:13:41 UTC