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Article #5002Re: All numeric representation of dates
From: Henry Spencer
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1988 01:08
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1988 01:08
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In article <622@uwovax.uwo.ca> miller@uwovax.uwo.ca (Greg Miller) writes: >The international standard for the representation of dates in all numeric form >is ISO 2014. As far as I am aware, the University of Western Ontario has >officially adopted this format for the all numeric representation of dates. Of course, in (at least) English-speaking areas, where people are much more familiar with the month names than the month numbers, using all-numeric dates in the human interface is STUPID STUPID STUPID. I also question the human engineering of forms that put the year first. It is consistent, and in some sense elegant, but it is poorly adapted to human needs. The most important information should be first. For most uses of dates, that is the day number, followed by the month. For internal forms, never seen by humans (programmers don't count :-)), ISO numeric dates are fine. They are also of some use in environments where multilingual legibility takes priority over legibility in any specific language. Otherwise, please be sensible rather than standard! -- Intel CPUs are not defective, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology they just act that way. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
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Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.std.internat Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: All numeric representation of dates Message-ID: <1988Aug28.010835.17290@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <3900@enea.se> <1785@water.waterloo.edu> <183@dcs.UUCP> <622@uwovax.uwo.ca> Date: Sun, 28 Aug 88 01:08:35 GMT