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

I've followed this thread silently for some time,
but have yet to see the following compromise suggested :

Given that nn-nn-nnnn is ambiguous (one doesn't know which
of the first two nn pairs is month and which is date), and
given that nn-mmm-yyyy is (as usually written) anglo-centric,
why not use the disambiguating syntax of the latter in 
conjunction with the non-localised nature of the former,
as in :

	nn-nnn-nnnn

where nn = day (1 to 31), nnn = month (001 to 012), and nnnn = year ?

Philip Taylor, RHBNC
--------
Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
> 
> 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 07:05:28 UTC