Re: Lack of ISO 8601 dates and times
Alexander Winston:
> There are too many date and time notations used on the Debian Web
> site, especially the main page.
There are a couple in use, yes. Which one is used depends on the
context.
> Toward the beginning of <http://www.debian.org/>, the "April 13th,
> 2004" format is used.
This is the format we call the "spoken date" format, and is used for
running text. It should always contain the month name fully spelled
out.
> Further down, the "13 Apr 2004" format is used repeatedly.
That's the "news date" format, and is used for listings. It is supposed
to be compact.
> The "Tue, Apr 13 00:30:00 UTC 2004" format is at the very bottom.
That's the "modification date" format. It is supposed to show the exact
modification time, down to the second.
> I suggest using *only* ISO 8601 style dates and times onward from this
> point. The first two formats would become "2004-04-13."
The first one (the one used in running text) definitely should remain.
It can be argued whether to change the second, but I don't think it's a
good idea, as I think that many English-speaking people will be
confused by it. A "semi-verbose" format like the one we're using now is
probably the best (as long as we're not using numeric MDY or DMY
formats).
> The third would become "2004-04-13 00:30:00 +00:00" or similar. (This
> format seems most legible to me; other variants are available.)
The modification time format could be better, yes. IIRC, they currently
use the default "ctime" format, which is quite ugly indeed. If
modified, it should probably be changed into either "Tue, 13 Apr 2004
00:30:00 UTC" or "Tue, 2004-04-13 00:30:00 UTC". Changing "UTC" into
"+00:00" would be a bad idea, IMHO.
Some translations do use ISO 8601 date formats for the page (the
formats are language dependent). For example, have a look at the
Swedish translation (index.sv.html); it uses ISO 8601 for all formats
but the "spoken" date format.
--
\\//
Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/
I do not read or respond to mail with HTML attachments.
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