Re: Human representation of dates, opinions

David Mankin <mankin@ants.com> writes:

> Actually, after hearing from and having to support random web users, it
> seems that typical English-speaking Americans even prefer 5-31-02
> 5:07:29pm much more. However, as a geek who likes dates to have lexical
> sorting == numeric sorting == chronological sorting, and fixed width,
> I'm quite happy with 2002-05-31 17:07:29.

Oh, yeah, if I were to guess at the form that the average US English
speaker would prefer, it would probably be something like:

    5/31/2002 5:07:29pm

I think you can get away with four-digit years these days without any real
complaints.

My point wasn't so much that ISO date format is people's preferred format
(although pretty much everyone understands it), but rather that %c
definitely *isn't* it. Unless you've got a system that changes %c
drastically from C locale to en or en_US locale, but I've yet to see one
of those.

> Since I'm lazy, I prefer to see timestamps in (translated to) localtime.
> That way I never see commit datestamps in the future. :-)

Likewise, actually. (Although I do think that if one translates, one
should tack on a time zone just so that one isn't losing information.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra_at_stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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