|
|
Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/23/07 10:55
Scripsit Toby A Inkster:
> Regarding date formats, both DD/MM/YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are common in
> the UK.
I won't argue about that statement, but I do say that both formats are
manifestly wrong in web authoring. The former gets confused with the
American (US) style, the latter with the ISO format, which was once selected
just because it was estimated that a notation with hyphens was not in use to
a significant extent, making YYYY-MM-DD unambiguous even when the year is
expressed in two digits.
If you need to use a compact, all-digit notation, then YYYY-MM-DD with a
four-digit year is the only sensible alternative in the World Wide Web
context.
But mostly you don't. Unless you tabulate dates, or something like that, you
should use month names or (in English) their three-letter abbreviations.
> I'm not awfully bothered about the dates being
> seen as ambiguous because the percentage of people who use MM/DD/YYYY
> is fairly small (worldwide, well under 10% when I last checked).
That might be only about 600,000,000 people, but I doubt whether your guess
is correct. The American notation is widely known outside the US, too. Even
the governmental statistics office in Finland uses that notation in some of
their statistics, in the Finnish language, violating Finnish standards but
following some "de-facto standards", I guess. The only cure to this mess is
to use _neither_ of the two competing systems (MM/DD/YYYY vs. DD/MM/YYYY).
> Those people who are used to MM/DD/YYYY dates ought to notice at
> least one of:
>
> * 'lang="en_GB"' on the <html> element;
> * DC.language <meta> element is "en_GB";
> * HTTP header "Content-Language: en_GB"; and
> * Top level domain name is "uk.".
Why should they notice that? In terms of HTML specifications, the decisive
declaration is the lang attribute, and your example contains a syntactically
malformed value for it. HTML specifications mandate the use of a hyphen, not
a low line, between subcodes of a language code. Besides, it is widely known
that lang attributes are very often just bogus - some authoring software
spits out lang="en" or something like that, with no regard to the language
actually used and without even informing the poor author.
Moreover, the lang attribute has no visible effect on the page, so how
should the use notice anything? It might affect a speech browser, but then
again, it might not.
> With regards to making it easy to programmatically sort articles, you
> should notice that the created, modified and accepted dates are shown
> as <meta> elements using Dublin Core and W3C date/time format,
If _you_ use software that actually utilizes metadata in Dublin Core format,
fine. But it is questionable whether we should encourage people into
spending their time with such metadata, which is basically write-only as far
as web authoring is considered. That is, people would just waste time in
souping up meta tags that will be ignored by all parties, except perhaps
specialized software - and if you are authoring for specialized software,
make sure you know what you are doing.
> <meta scheme="W3CDTF"
> content="2007-03-21 13:46:20+0000"
Last time I checked, that was an incorrect format, since the W3CDTF
prescribes the use of a version of ISO 8601 that uses "T" and not space " "
as separator between date and time; see
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
And in practice, specialized software that digs up Dublin Core metadata
might well play by those old rules (rejecting the above data as malfored),
even if newer rules were issued.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|