Re: Date and Time Formats

Ron,

[I'm copying the list www-international@w3.org]

Thank you for your comments.

In the user interface, the formatting of dates and times need to be
configurable, in order to fit in with different cultural conventions.
The W3C Note you refer to addresses not dates and times perceived by
the user, but dates and times exchanged between software components.
This work has been taken much further in the (proposed) XML Schema
specification, Part 2:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2

The W3C's I18N WG and IG are helping the W3C XML Schema WG refine the
definitions of dates and times in that specification in order to
overcome some problems.

Regards,
Misha


On 05/01/2001 03:02:02 Ron Holt wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I just read the paper "Date and Time Formats" at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime-970915.html.  Perhaps you are already
> aware of the following comments.
>
> Two comments:  when I lived in Argentina, I had to get used to the format
> where the month was the middle field and was expressed in Roman numerals.
> For example, April 6th, 1985 would be written 06-VI-1986 or 6-VI-86.
> Official mail post marks used this format.  I believe other countries
> use this convention also.  I rather liked this format after a while but
> I'm sure others would have a difficult time adjusting to it.
>
> Second, my personal favorite:  Is a numerical day in two digits, the month
> followed by three letter alphabetic abbreviation and the year in four
> numerical digits.  For example, the date mentioned above would be written
> "06-Apr-2000".  There is no ambiguity between day and month since one
> is numeric and the other alphabetic.  There is also no ambiguity between
> the day and year since the year is written in four digits.  This format
> avoid the particularly pernicious "01-01-01" and other dates that might
> haunt us until 2013.  The fields could be separated by slashes as well
> or be elided altogether.
>
> What do you think?  Am I tilting at windmills?
>
> Regards,
> Ron
>
> --
> Ron Holt <ron@holt.org> www.ronholt.com


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Received on Saturday, 6 January 2001 09:44:26 UTC