Tuesday, April 05, 2005

0:00

I don't think I've ever seen my computer switch over from 23:59 to 0:00... It was pretty cool.

Tonight, I learned what the ISO 8601 standard for date is: YYYY-MM-DD. Good to know. Why can't everybody just do it the same? And who uses a.m. and p.m. anymore...? Ooooh - wait - it's just the US (and perhaps one or two others). Well, my application's home page will comply with the International Standard - there you have it...

3 comments:

appwiz said...

You mean your application's date/time display isn't culture sensitive?

Please please reconsider. ISO-8601 is a wonderful format for internal representation and for European audiences where they don't sue over self-spilled piping hot cups of caffeine. Or ban teachers from using red ink.

However, it's not visually intuitive for any audience. 2005-04-05 14:22 takes longer for a user to comprehend when compared with Tuesday, April 5, 2005 2:22 PM. If you don't switch to the LongDateTime string, you will have a majority of users complaining about the "weird" date format they have to learn. Keep in mind the first principles of UI design: make the user comfortable.

I'll stop being pedantic now. I ran out of $0.02.

Tabita said...

Settle down... It will be configurable. :) What were you doing up at 3:45? I went to bed an hour before that...

appwiz said...

The answer you seek found its way onto my weblog.