Date formate on Channel 9 | The Coffeehouse

bishfish

A word in the ear of Ch 9 web designers.....

I suppose Channel 9 expects to get an international quotient to it's audience, so why do you persist with what is a USA-only numeric date format mmddyy when virtually the whole of the rest of the world uses ddmmyy.

What is this date 7/5/04? - USA july 5, to the rest of us May 7. It is all so easy to fix just use alpha numeric for all dates on web-sites. Get with the program here guys.

eagle

The server is in Seattle, when visiting another place you should respect their ways and customs.

bishfish

Nonsense - I asume the sites primary objective is to provide a platform for discussion, advice, information, and, and, - part of that is not based on today but looking back at yesterdays news advice etc. and that is where the date problem really rears its ugly head.

I stand by my comments and in this day and age insularity of the type you espouse is not warranted.

Simo
With me it's a full-time job.

eagle wrote:
The server is in Seattle, when visiting another place you should respect their ways and customs.

Absolute rubbish.

When I get on a plane, land in Seattle and walk up and down your sidewalks. I'll respect your ways and customs.

You publish a page on the internet I expect the world to be able to cope with it, and for a professional site I expect the developer to show a bit of courtesy and utilise any localisation functionality they have to hand.

I see some dates on the C9 site have three letters for month format.

Maybe this is a job for FxCop.....

SiR_CharLZ
The Future Is Now

Maybe you should stick a legend or key on your monitor so you can decipher the date? ;-]

eagle

I suppose next you’ll be demanding the channel9 time be set to GMT.

Simo
With me it's a full-time job.

eagle wrote:

I suppose next you’ll be demanding the channel9 time be set to GMT.

Actually eagle, the time's are formatted

appropriately for each user. The time of your post appears to me as 12:41 PM.

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

i'm sure it'd be pretty easy for charles and crew to add a css or something file to the registration file so that it changes dates according to where in the world, for UK users and most people living outside of the USA it would be DD/MM/YY(YY), for those working in america or using the MM/DD/YY(YY) illogicality then it would do that.

as far as i see it does show times as gmt when i'm logged in as Jaz

eagle

Why don't you British wankers come up with a solution to what is ostensibly
a sence of lost British national esteem.

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

what the....

did someone not give you the right amount of birdfeed eagle, whats up with you?

eagle

The Eagle is a carnivore.

Simo
With me it's a full-time job.

eagle wrote:
Why don't you British wankers come up with a solution to what is ostensibly
a sence of lost British national esteem.

What a terribly intelligent argument you’ve constructed, eagle.

A passing comment observing that some people on the planet instinctively interpret 9/7/04 as 9^th July 2004. Is countered by you claiming that we’re British w***kers suffering from a loss of national esteem. Ha.

I tend to think that you’re the one packing a few issues, along with the odd chip on your shoulder.

Kaelan

Simo wrote:

A passing comment observing that some people on the planet instinctively interpret 9/7/04 as 9^th July 2004. Is countered by you claiming that we’re British w***kers suffering from a loss of national esteem. Ha.

I tend to think that you’re the one packing a few issues, along with the odd chip on your shoulder.

Agreed. I personally prefer the alternate date format, and I've never been out of the US. DDMMYY just makes more sense.

eagle

There must be 30 or more countries represented on channel9, why have we repeatedly had threads with British Bulldogs barking?

spiderLab

he he, before this read, I red a My SQL article explaining the differences betweeen MS SQL and MySQL, one of them was the default way for storing date format:

MS SQL(which channel 9 uses I guess):
MM-DD-YYYY

My SQL:
YYYY-MM-DD

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

pretty much only america uses the random date feature. Europe uses DDMMYY, Japan uses YYYYMMDD

eagle

Let's adopt the Mayan Calender.

sbc
GW R/Me

Almost looks like an IP address.

People only suggest GMT because it is global time and used as a reference to all time zones. You can also refer to GTM as UTC (as they are both the same).

SETI@home uses UTC, they even have a UTC Time Conversion page. So why not other international sites (which Channel9 is).

To prevent ambiguity you could always use dd-mmm-yyyy (i.e. 21-Jul-2004)

The thing with localisation is often that Windows users still have it set in US format (DD/MM/YYYY), and code that checks the browsers location often gets 'en-US'. It would be good if Windows CD's bought in the UK where set to British Summer Time rather than Seattle. I wonder how many PC's are incorrectly set up due to this?

Keskos

Let's be respectful to each other. No need to fight over something that can be easily fixed using software. Let people personalize their date format, and that absolutely makes sense. Why do we have all these localization, internationalization work if everbody has to respect the customs of the area where the server is based. By adding these features you won't disrespect American customs, you will add great value to Channel 9. Of course feasibility of this is another story and only channel 9 creators can answer that. I think it is a great idea though. If Channel 9 is destined to become a great place for discussion etc.. this would be a nice addition.

bishfish

Well said,

there is another advantage to using alpha numeric dates on web-sites and that is to aid people to whom english (in any variant) is not their native tongue, like me for instance. As some have noted, let the machine do the interpreting.

manickernel
anticipate consequences..

We are outsourcing our jobs to the rest of the world, so you might as well get used the way we do dates.

P.S.- and soon start driving on the "right" side of the road.

Smiley

eagle

Why doesn't a British Blowfish write the app, if date conversion is such a problem for YOU, then you should invest the time and energy to come up with a solution

AndyC

manickernel wrote:

P.S.- and soon start driving on the "right" side of the road.

And by right you mean left, right? Wink

And what's all the fuss over anyway. The dates show up localized here in England already.

Kaelan

A couple changes to Format() calls is all that should be needed. It's taking you more effort to moan and whine here in this thread than it would've taken to fix it. Smiley

eagle

Indeed