[DRAFT] QA Tips - Use international format for date

This is a draft Open for comments for future publications
		http://www.w3.org/2001/06tips/


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Title: Use international date format

There are potential usability problems when you do not use  
international date format. Let say, that you have a Web page with a  
date information expressed like that:

	02/04/03

Do you mean:
	2nd of April 2003 	(European style)
	4th of February 2003	(USA style)
	3rd of April 2002

How do you know which system is used on the website your visitor is  
looking at? Is the person who will read your website will be able to  
guess what format date you are using.

* Good practice

To avoid this confusion, it exist a international format defined by ISO.

	CCYY-MM-DD

	where	CC is the century
		YY is the year
		MM is the month 	01 (January) to 12 (December)
		DD is the day		01 to 31


So the date we have written before is now expressed as:

	2002-04-03


Further Reading:
* Date and Time Formats
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
* ISO 8601:2000 International Date Format.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/ 
CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=26780&ICS1=1&ICS2=140&ICS3= 
30
* Everything on Calendar systems
http://www.calendarzone.com/

--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 18 August 2003 17:52:48 UTC