wiki icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
wiki copied to clipboard

Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon indieweb

Improve date readibility

Open skinny97214 opened this issue 10 years ago • 8 comments

Currently the events page uses YYYY-MM-DD which has two problems. First, the year is first, so if you scan down the left edge you see only years which is not very useful. Second, there is month/day ambiguity between US and the rest of the world, so I'm not sure whether this is April 9th or September 4th.

Current: 2014-04-09 Desired: 09 April 2014

screen shot 2014-04-08 at 4 03 41 pm

skinny97214 avatar Apr 08 '14 23:04 skinny97214

Gregor is working on a much better looking template for events! In-progress screenshot below. user_gregorlove com_sandbox - indiewebcamp

aaronpk avatar May 10 '14 22:05 aaronpk

Agreed about the scanning down the left edge and seeing the same year.

Disagreed about month/day ambiguity in ISO Dates. When W3C i18n group user-tested YYYY-MM-DD dates it was consistently unambigously interpreted correctly as year, month, day. Absent the year, yes, just "MM-DD" is a problem. But that's not what we're using.

I'd prefer to keep things numerical rather than using English-centric month-names. We're trying to appeal to a broader International community, and YYYY-MM-DD dates are the most readable worldwide of any format across languages etc.

tantek avatar Jul 22 '14 03:07 tantek

Are we doing anything else for localization outside of dates?

skinny97214 avatar Jul 22 '14 03:07 skinny97214

There are actually several articles in several other languages: http://indiewebcamp.com/other-languages

@gregorlove did you ever end up making any more progress on that event template?

aaronpk avatar Jun 02 '15 22:06 aaronpk

It's about 90% functional. To get around MediaWiki restrictions on using template variables in time elements, it's using value-class pattern and there's some display: none being used, unfortunately. I believe it's parsing correctly, though. See http://indiewebcamp.com/Template:one-day-event and http://indiewebcamp.com/User:Gregorlove.com/sandbox

One thing that still needs to be done is wrapping multiple locations in separate p-location http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2015-04-02#t1428004903208

gRegorLove avatar Jun 03 '15 01:06 gRegorLove

I just added support for up to 10 different p-locations for an event. I think it should be ready to use, pending feedback. https://indiewebcamp.com/Template:one-day-event

gRegorLove avatar Jun 03 '15 01:06 gRegorLove

IndieWebCamp has both a global community, and a very strong US-representation, so both US-centric Month Day, Year dates, and Europe-centric Day Month Year dates are unacceptable.

Let's stick with ISO Dates since they work the best globally, and are readable / different enough for US users for them to understand unambiguously as well.

See also:

  • https://twitter.com/amazingmap/status/599931666803597312
  • https://xkcd.com/1179/

tantek avatar Jun 09 '15 01:06 tantek

I agree that if we were using numbers only the ISO format would be preferable, @tantek, but we're not burdened with that constraint. I'm not proposing a numeric date, I'm proposing spelling out the month with letters. Spelling out the month eliminates the ambiguity. The ISO standard wasn't designed with human readability as its primary concern.

Wiki of date formats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country China, which is a YYYYMMDD country uses XX Month YYYY on its visas. https://china.visahq.com/information/images/info/China-visa.jpg

skinny97214 avatar Jun 09 '15 08:06 skinny97214