Re: HTML has, probably, confusing date format

Dear Cyril, dear list members,

Am Freitag, 29. November 2002 06:53 schrieb Cyril:
> What is this, the "00:41 2002-11-26 +0300", Liorean? Is it a weather
> forecast or a credit card information? But it isn't a traditional, human
> date and it isn't the new, next standard, date (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD).
> I can't remember how many those thoroughly researched standards for
> dates existed in my life. Where they are now? And how I have tired!
> Please, leave me the option, the freedom, at least, to choose on my own
> which date format to use.

Pro current format (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD):
- Some people like it.
- ASCII sorting
- Internationalized
- Already implemented
- If you know it's capable of sorting, you really cannot intermix month and 
day.
- It's easy to parse
- It's similar to the date as it is stored in several RDBMS products

Con current format:
- Some people don't like it.
- If you don't know it's for sorting, you /might/ intermix month and day, /as 
long/ as you don't know the format.


Pro new format (Something with three letter english month name abbreviations 
in it)
- Some people like it.
- Month cannot be intermixed with day

Con new format:
- Some people don't like it.
- Not easily sortable (not sortable by simple string comparison)
- Not Internationalized
- Changes in current implementations of User Agents are neccessary
- Complex to parse (though it's not really really complex, but it is 
definitely much more complex than the current one)
- Incompatibility between User Agents while the new format is introduced
- Most current user agents' vendors are still not able to handle HTML 4 or 
HTML 4.01, not speaking of XHTML. Don't do any unneccessary changes in data 
formats until they had time to adopt. (On the other hand: Obviously bad CMM 
levels of user agent vendors must not be a reason to discontinue developing 
of new stanrads.)


Anyway:
Those people that have chosen that time format aren't stupids. They had 
reasonable thoughts to choose that format. probably much more than we just 
collected on the list.
I think most uf us absolutely disqualify to continue discussion on that topic 
for several reasons.

So I suggest to just enhance my Pro/Con-Lists to add the points I missed (I 
must admit that I do have my own opinion and though I tried to be objective 
in the list above I probably failed on that, so let the other party express 
their thoughts) and then quickly stop this thread.


Bye
-- 
ITCQIS GmbH
Christian Wolfgang Hujer
Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter
Telefon: +49  (0)89  27 37 04 37
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Received on Friday, 29 November 2002 01:47:43 UTC