I'm not sure I want to be dragged into this, but I'll offer at least one reply. Can you clarify what you mean to say you disagree with? It's not clear. Are you challenging why people used DateFormat historically over LSDateformat? Or debating that I've erred in how/why people have not moved to the latter? I didn't think it was debatable, just historical. But if you see it differently...
As for your saying, "the only difference is that LSDateFormat takes an option argument called locale", what do you mean? The locale argument is new in CF8, yet the LS functions have existed for nearly 10 years. They are certainly different. The LS functions are driven by SetLocale (if the locale argument is not specified) where the older ones (like DateFormat) are not. They have no notion of locales at all. You say, "instead of taking the servers locale / region settings ColdFusion went its own method that didn't work"--what method are you referring to? Just to be clear? Is it that you think that when they considered adding LSDateFormat, they should have instead just made DateFormat work based on selocale? I suppose they could have. You'd need to take it up with Allaire/MM/Adobe engineers to fully understand their motivation. Sure, sometimes it's faulty, but often we find (even in current discussions over things in 8/8.1) that there are debates where a choice seems obvious--until someone points up a compatibility or other issue. Just saying we ought to have a little grace when considering such things, rather than presume people were being stupid. Anyway, I have no investment in this either way. Please don't set me up as a strawman/punching bag. I was just offering another perspective. You're certainly free to disagree, but don't feel that I'm trying to pick a fight with you. I'm really not. Just want to help you (help everyone) get on the same page in the discussion. Finally, I hesitate to ask, but what's your beef with CFHTMLHEAD? If it's been debated before, feel free (someone, anyone) to point to a URL. I use it all the time in a site where the HTML head tags are written previously but later I want to set a specific <title> for a given page. That's the best way (and only way I know) to do that. Or are you complaining about some subtlety of it that doesn't work always? /charlie -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Scott Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 1:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: should DateFormat() be depricated (in favour ofLSDateFormat())? Charlie, I will disagree with you, and this is why. If you look at the attributes / arguments that both functions take, the only difference is that LSDateFormat takes an option argument called locale. But if you do not set the Locale it is by default set to USA date format (I can't confirm this, I can only go by the fact if the local is not set it ends up that way). So in hindsight, instead of adding that extra argument to DateFormat the developers moved over to a set of LS functions... Why? To me that is a hack, or blindsighted. So, to overcome the problem of such things the rest of the world outside of the USA has to use the locale to get proper date formating, and instead of taking the servers locale / region settings Coldfusion went its own method that didn't work. So now we have something where we can use LS functions for locale, but we now have a function that is left behind because it can't be depricated and that is why I call it a hack. However, any developer worth their salary would design with locale in mind and allow for the application to switch to what ever the user of the application would want the date in and not what the Developer of the Application wants them to be. I guess it can be debated all you like, but at the end of the day LSDateformat is not the only function that was added as a hack, I can name so many of these functions that have been added without any thinking at all. CFHTMLHEAD, is just one of those tags. On 1/8/08, Charlie Arehart (lists account) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > I step into these waters carefully, as I know that it's a serious > issue for many here. As for the whole debate about DateFormat vs > LSDateformat, etc., it really is just a remnant of history. I wouldn't > say it's "there for backward compatibility" but rather it was there > first. The LS functions were added back in CF4, if I recall correctly > (or maybe 3.1), and of course by then thousands if not millions of > lines of code would have been written using the older DateFormat. > Also, since this was before the move to CFMX (and the standardization > on Java locale processing), there may well have been issues that kept > some from even moving to the LS functions if they wanted to. > > Then there's the point made about whether Americans (and software > makers) pay enough attention to I18N. Surely we don't, and it's > embarrassing, but this is similar to Owen's complaint: why don't we > Americans just get with the program on using the dateformat used by > many others. As above, I don't know who was first, but we could also > debate driving on the left vs right, race tracks going clock-wise versus counter-, and using the metric system. > :-) Honestly, having lived in both countries, I wouldn't argue against > the latter (nor against the date formatting change). I was a child in > school in the 70's when metric conversion was attempted. We kids were > all for it. It was the older folks who fought it. Changes like that > are really tough to make, what with folks clinging to old ways, fearing change, etc. > > I honestly see it the same with DateFormat. Could they deprecate it? Sure? > Should they? Why not. Will they ever obsolete it (make it no longer work)? > That will take some backbone, considering the millions of lines of > code that would likely use it. I doubt it would happen. Just too > painful. I'm just one voice, and not even an informed one on this > subject. This is clearly something (internationalization) that affects > some far more than others (and I might add, sadly for some, more than > most.) That's probably the root of the problem: typical American ignoring of international matters. > /charlie > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
