On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 12:34:10PM +0100, Gerhard Häring <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Le 13/03/02 ā 05:20, John Buttery écrivit: >> Even the ISO format is somewhat lacking in this regard, since although >> it is ambiguous in a vacuum, the fact is that people may not _know_ you >> are using that format and so there is still ambiguity, although not a >> failing of the format itself. > >That's true of any representation of information. I personally am a >great fan of ISO date format.
Oh, I definitely agree that the ISO format is the way to go. Although
I would change it a bit since technically the hyphens (-) are
unnecessary due to the fields being fixed-length, but that's a bigger
nitpick than even I am willing to seriously make. I was just saying
that, unfortunately, the ISO format is only unambiguous if the parser
(in this case, a human email recipient/reader) knows that that's the
format being used.
I certainly think that ISO dates should be used in headers, which are
governed by RFC standards...but the trouble is that in-message quoting
attributions aren't, so it's anybody's guess what format is being used.
That being said, in practice it is probably a good bet 9 times out of
10 that if you see a date like xxxx-xx-xx it is probaby YYYY-MM-DD...
>> It therefore follows that the only option out of the three that does
>> the job without any ambiguity at all is the one with an alpha data.
>> Yes, it's culturally biased,
>
>Indeed it is very biased. What if I used "Am 2. Pfinsta nach Mariä
>Himmelfahrt, um 3/4 12", which was perfectly understandable in Bavaria
>50 years ago, but even nowadays most Bavarian people will wonder which
>date that is. Of course, everybody outside Bavaria will probably make no
>sense at all of it.
You do have a point, but my response is that the attribution that
Simon suggested/used, and that I am agreeing with, is much less
culturally biased than your example, and furthermore only to the point
necessary to eliminate ambiguity. If you or anyone else has a
suggestion of a way to represent a date without cultural bias that fits
the following parameters, by all means let me know and I will switch to
it:
1) Must use only "standard" formats (no language-specific constructs
2) Must specify the full date to a precision of 1 second with no
ambiguity
3) Must not rely on "accepted standards" or "prior agreement"
Having said that, it does appear that we have collectively identified
an element of email that needs discussing and standardizing. If one
were going to submit some kind of "mini-RFC" for attribution lines, how
would one go about it?
--
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John Buttery
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