[wp-hackers] Default Date is Inhumane...

[Michel Valdrighi]

Le lun 23/08/2004 à 21:45, Michael Heilemann a écrit :
> The default date syntax for WordPress is 'n/j/Y', which outputs: 
> 8/23/2004
> 
> I suggest using 'l, F jS, Y', which'll output: Monday, August 23rd, 2004
> 
> Reason being, that with the current default, it's easy to become 
> confused by what date we're talking about. Not only is the date 
> denominated using only numbers, which makes it hard for the human mind 
> to parse quickly (at least for non-coders), but the current setup also 
> outputs it like this: month/day/year. This is an American way of doing 
> things, with the International standard being day/month/year.
> 
> If 'Monday, August 23rd, 2004' is used instead, there is no confusion 
> about this at all, making 07/08/2004 instead display as August 7th, 
> 2004.

Hello,

That's escaping Charybdis only to run into Scylla. Many cultures spell
dates differently, so the 'th' notation wouldn't make sense for them
either. (Not sure about Québec, but in French we would never say "Lundi,
Août 7ème, 2004", since in French month days are not ordinal.

So here are two solutions:
1) Make default dates more inhumane but internationally understandable:
2004/08/07
2) Make the default date format rely on l10n. In that case it would be
good to make .mo files providers specify the country their file relates
to, as in for example fr_FR for French in France as opposed to fr_CA for
French in Québec (some words and their usage differ).

I fancy #2, with #1 as a non-l10n default.
To accomodate our large US userbase, we could then ship WP with en_US as
the default l10n with its 'l, F jS, Y' date format, while using
international English by default in messages.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Michel Valdrighi
http://zengun.org/weblog/ (redesigning soon, I swear)