Re: one more response to your duration syntax survey

On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
> 
> * As a non-native English speaker, I find "h" for hours, "m" for minutes 
> and so on a bit unfamiliar. I would prefer a way that allows the more 
> common [hh]:[mm]:[ss] practice. The ISO 8601 "PT[hh]:[mm]:[ss]" seems 
> odd too so I guess another attribute for duration as stated on [1] would 
> work for me, although I can't guarantee if spelling "duration" is 
> actually easier than using "m" and "s".
>
> Anyway, a string like "3m20s" doesn't show up in real world UI and 
> "3:20" is obviously more common.
> 
> [1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Time_element#duration

I considered this, but it turns out to introduce ambiguities with 
actual time formats, e.g.:

   <time>12:10</time>

...could be the middle of the day, or a 12 minute song, or a 12 hour 
period, it's hard to say.


> * For the majority of use cases there will be less than 4 components and 
> I don't think "1h20m10s" is any less readable than "1h 20m 10s", and 
> "3m20s" looks better to me than "3m 20s". Therefore, I am against 
> intervening spaces.

They don't seem to cause any harm, and some people like them, so I went 
with allowing them.


> * I am against non-single-letter abbreviations. I don't want to have 
> trouble thinking which one of "hours" and "hour" is right.

Agreed.


> * I would prefer the following heuristic for "month" and "minutes"
> disambiguation (for non ISO 8601 string only):
> 1. For a "m", If there's a "y" before it or there's a "w", "d", "h" or
> another "m" after it. Then "m" is for "month" (so you can do "1y3m" or
> "1m10d")
> 2. Otherwise "m" is for "minutes"
> (I heard the rumor that Microsoft uses "M" for month and "m" for
> minutes, so I guess this needs some input from them)

I went with not allowing months at all, which simplies this rather.


> * I don't yet see the value of conformance-parsing mismatch here and I 
> don't know who'll implement "parse a duration string" either. I'll mark 
> non-conforming duration string as having no meaning for now.

The value is avoiding having to have two parsers (one for the each of the 
two duration syntaxes).

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 18 November 2011 20:41:03 UTC