On Sep 9, 2013, at 10:48 AM, Jeffrey Oleander <[email protected]> wrote:
> The issue is users entering dates […] am sorely wishing I could just enforce > ISO date entry as in the quoted example by using pop-up menus. Some do, but > the dread of customer rebellion is strong, and they want to enter them in the > slap-dash, hurried, harried ways they're used to writing them, or finding > them in their source materials. You’re mixing this up with a totally different issue. *Users* should be able to enter dates however the hell they want. The computer is the user’s servant, not the other way around*. Yes it can be awkward to parse natural-language dates, but it’s pretty much a solved problem. I really appreciate software like Fantastical and Siri that lets me type/say stuff like “next tue 3pm”. *Data formats* should use strict standards for dates. I spent several years working on RSS clients and RSS parsing, and you would not believe the kind of crap people put into their feeds as post dates. I even ran into feeds that forgot to turn off localization so the dates came out like “Freitag, 27 Juli”. We ended up with an array of 20+ format strings and had to loop through them until one of them could parse the string. (Of course it didn’t help that the RSS “specs” were hopelessly vague and for a long time there wasn’t a validator.) These are of course unrelated issues because no one would put unparsed user-input date strings into a well-defined file format. Right? > MSFT Javascript (and it's non-standards) is evil, hence, JSON is evil. Huh? Microsoft doesn’t drive JavaScript (although they had some say in the ECMAscript standardization.) Mozilla has more influence than they do. And JSON isn’t tied to JavaScript, it just happens to look like the syntax JS uses to express object trees. (It’s 99% the same as Python, for example.) —Jens * Related: there’s a special circle in Hell for web coders too lazy to write a regexp that allows users to enter a credit card number with spaces or dashes in it. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
