Re: Date Fields in HTML

James Brown / 2003-06-03 02:42:

> [Appologies for the < and > values in my previous post- I
> should have guess the W3 would have used <pre>!.  The corrected
> text should read as below.]

<pre>?? Email is always text/plain. :)

> Thank you for your comments.  I agree that the tags would
> definately have to specify the type of date contained in the date
> field.  That was kind of what I was trying to acheive by the
> format="us" or format="uk" attribute, but this is my first
> attempt at documenting an idea for the W3C so I'm sure I didn't
> express it properly!
> 
> I was thinking along the lines of:
> 
> <date format="us">05/07/03</date> - which the browser would 
> interpret as 7th of May 2003, or:
> 
> <date format="uk">05/07/03</date> - which the browser would 
> interpret as 5th of July 2003.
> 
> <date format="zh">05/07/03</date> - which the browser would 
> interpret as 3rd of July 2005 (Chinese format)

What's the problem with

<html xml:lang="fi">
...
<date time="2002-11-19T13:24:38+02:00">13:25 19.11.2002</date>
...

instead? The point is, we already have ISO-8601 and there's no point 
inventing new systems. If you want different *rendering* CSS is 
right tool for it. ISO-8601 is already *official* format in many 
(all?) European countries and AFAIK, USA has already agreed (at some 
level) to use this format, too. Unfortunately, not many know about 
the fact. For example, ISO-8601 is the official time format here in 
Finland too, but when I use it here, people look puzzled as the old 
format of dd.mm.yyyy looks much more familiar to them.

See also:
http://www.qsl.net/g1smd/isoimp.htm
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002Nov/0113.html

-- 
Mikko

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2003 03:58:42 UTC