[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Ok to use cvs keywords for date and revision?

> > The ISO "YYYY-MM-DD" format should be used. The templates will
> > reflect that (soon) and we should put that in the LDP AG (if it
> > isn't already specified).
> What does one use if they want to only use the month?  The advantage
> of spelling out the name of the month (and leaving out the day) is
> that it's easier to remember.  For example, August 2000 is much 

There are a few very good reasons why people came up with the ISO
8601 format for dates.

 - as there had not been any universally accepted standard for the
   order of the fields (e.g. US does MM/DD, whereas Canada uses
   DD/MM), some decision had to be made.
 - YYYY-MM-DD has the nice side effect, that you can sort it
   alphabetically and achieve chronological ordering.
 - while spelling out the names for months or for days of the week
   works well within a single locale, it causes utter confusion in
   an international environment.
 - all spelled out formats are less standardized and therefore
   harder to parse by a program. YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,sss on the
   other hand is very easy to parse and still quite human readable
   (actually, if you want to be fully standards compliant, the
   " " should be a "T", but that makes it a little more difficult
   to read for humans).

So, if you feel that you absolutely must annotate your dates with some
locale specific format, then I won't be able to stop you; but whatever
you do, make sure that you always include the ISO string. The latter
is the only format that you can expect to be universally understood
anywhere that people use the Gregorian calendar.

For more information on ISO 8601, check out
http://hydracen.com/dx/y2k/iso8601.htm and
http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/miscdate.htm

Now, can we please put this discussion to rest?



Markus

-- 
Markus Gutschke                                Resonate, Inc.
3637 Fillmore Street #106                      385 Moffett Park Drive
San Francisco, CA 94123-1600                   Sunnyvale, CA 94089
+1-415-567-8449                                +1-408-548-5528
markus@gutschke.com                            mgutschk@resonate.com


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org