Bug#111268: Svenska språknämnden is a preferrable authority for Swedish as a language
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 09:51:20PM +0200, Göran Uddeborg wrote:
> Keld Jørn Simonsen writes:
>
> > > Is there a SIS standard for dates too, or are you referring to the ITS
> > > standard mentioned previously? What is the number?
> >
> > Yes, there is a SIS standard for dates, I believe it is SIS/ISO 8601.
>
> But that is the ISO standard, not a specific Swedish standard.
Yes, it is an international standard that turned swedish.
But actually I think it was a Swedish standard before it became an ISO
standard, at least the sewdes had special notation for time periodes
with a double hyphen, instead of a slash. The swedes changed it
subsequently to a slash.
> Then, on what do you base that this is meant for locales? It is an
> international standard, meant in particular to define a format to
> avoid confusion for dates when they may cross an international border.
> (First paragraph in the introduction.) Also note in section 1 Scope:
> "This International Standard is applicable whenever dates and times
> are included in information interchange."
Yes, it is an international standard, but it is also *the* Swedish
standard. Evenmore it has become the defacto standard for Sweden, one of
the few countries where even Microsift use the YYYY-MM-DD format as
default. Also your persnoal identity numbers use this format.
> While ISO 8601 is a good standard to use in many cases, and I often
> do, for me it is quite opposite of a locale. A locale is meant for
> information to be adapted to a particular country/language. If
> information might need to be interpreted in more than one locale, it
> should not be localised to one of them, it should use the C locale.
> (Or the program should not do setlocale(), if it is a program which
> always is used in such a context.)
I believe Sweden is a country where the ISO 8601 standard has also
become the local standard, as indicated above.
Venlig hilsen
Keld
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