Re: [OT] HTML has, probably, confusing date format

Cyril wrote:
> [In http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002Nov/0156.html ,
> Mikko wrote:] --------------------------------
> 
>>For example, ISO 8601 has been official date format in China since
>>1994 and IIRC there're pretty many people in China.
> 
>       So what is the IIRC;
>       could you explain?

I tried to be fun. IIRC stands for "If I Remember Correctly", which is 
pretty often used abbreviation just like AFAIK (As Far As I Know).

>>I'd be fine if ISO 8601 defined date format as DDMMYYYY but that's 
>>because official format is DD.MM.YYYY where I live.
> 
> By a strange twist of fate, where I live, similar but worse date format
> also had been pushed through. (I evaluate it as worse because it had
> year like YY.) And all the time during that format was being pushed I
> preferred *.MMM.* OR *.MMMM.* date formats i. e. formats where a month
> represented only by letters because among other reasons, a month
> represented by a word unambiguously determines a string comprising the
> month-word as a Gregorian calendar's date and, in addition, it clear
> shows a structure of that date/string. E. g. Date/Time Formats of
> RFC2616, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", (
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt ), section 3.3.

The problem with DD-MMM-YYYY is that MMM is localized to English 
speaking people. This has been discussed in this same thread already.

Why are the months so important anyway? It's simply a tradition of 
counting days in randomly selected block sizes (I mean why second month 
has a couple of days less than others, why the shortest month isn't the 
last one? Why the need to have 30 or 31 days in months when you still 
cannot make it even in the end of year? Why a month isn't dividable by a 
week? etc etc etc). If we could get people to use YYYY-MM-DD format, 
perhaps we could get people to use YYYY-DDD format in the future.

We cannot change that a year has about 365 days but we can change how we 
count time during that year. Though, there was once a discussion at 
slahdot.org how earth's rotation around the sun should be slowed down to 
be able to use 10-based day format :)

-- 
Mikko

Received on Thursday, 28 November 2002 06:58:34 UTC