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Posted by Toby A Inkster on 04/23/07 09:37
Jim Moe wrote:
> I'm a bit unclear about the rules, if any, for date format. I thought
> that to avoid confusion with US layout that European format used either
> hyphens or dots: 20-04-2007 or 20.04.2007. (I've always preferred the
> unambiguous Apr 4, 2007 or 4-Apr-2007. suitable for English only of
> course. Or 2007-04-20 (sorts nicely).)
Not commenting on the rest, as it's template-related stuff which I'm not
particular interested in at the moment. My current template is just
a temporary measure at the moment. I'm no good at visual design, so it
takes me a long time to come up with something I really like. It will no
doubt be quite some time before I do, and it's unlikely to look much like
the current design!
Regarding date formats, both DD/MM/YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are common in the
UK. DD.MM.YYYY would be recognised as a date, but is more common on
continental Europe. 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). 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.".
Dates are stored internally as UNIX timestamps. The CMS software then
has 6 basic date formats set up for displaying dates: short, medium and
long formats, each with or without the time. These date formats can be
localised by the publisher, so an American publisher might choose
"MM/DD/YYYY" as the short format without time.
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, e.g. from
http://beta.tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/03/21/utf8-validation/:
<meta scheme="W3CDTF"
content="2007-03-21 13:46:20+0000"
name="DC.date.accepted">
<meta scheme="W3CDTF"
content="2007-03-21 13:46:20+0000"
name="DC.date.created">
<meta scheme="W3CDTF"
content="2007-04-08 22:48:38+0100"
name="DC.date.modified">
> Completely trivial fluff: The code uses tabs to indent. It becomes
> rather hard to read as the text quickly disappears off the right.
> Bandwidth reduction measure (1 tab vs 2 spaces)?
Tabs are hardcoded everywhere, so it would be a lot of work to change
them. Besides which, if you've got a decent text editor, you ought to be
able to change the tab width to your liking. I have mine set so that one
tab is equivalent to 4 spaces.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux
* = I'm getting there!
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