On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Michael MD <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...btw looking at the examples draws attention to a big usability problem
> with so-called "human dates"...
> (which has little to do with microformats or markup .. its more a problem
> with culture and education)
>
>
> If something like "February 9th" appears on a page is that really
> "human-friendly"?
> ..... what year is that? is it coming up ? ... or am I looking at an old
> page about something from last year? ...
Ah yes, the "we know screenreader users are having problems with full
ISO...but *actually* they're better because they're more unambiguous"
argument.
Strangely, humans have been using "human-friendly" date/time formats
since...forever, and have coped fine with ambiguity for the most part.
Human communications are by their very nature "fuzzy" and ambiguous,
and usually this fuzziness is then clarified through additional
knowledge ("is this blog from the US or from the UK?", "when you say
'dinner at 8' i assume you mean 8PM/20:00?", etc).
Yes, in a completely ideal world, if microformats weren't creating
actual problems to certain users as in this case, I too would jump on
the "we're disambiguating the web, one datetime at a time" bandwagon.
But for the time being, while there are known problems, I'd rather
wait until the uf community makes a concerted effort to take all the
proposed alternatives that can solve the issue into consideration and
adopt the best-of-breed one.
> Do you really want to hide a "machine date" when that may the only thing on
> the page you can use to tell what the date actually is?
Ok, in both cases, the onus is on the authors of those pages and how
ambiguous they are in the content creation. You bemoan the fact that
authors haven't made it clear what date/time they actually mean, but
then expect the same authors to also put unambiguous full ISO datetime
microformats around their fuzzy information? The real solution here is
to get these content authors to actually write their information in a
clearer way (in clear text), I would suggest.
> It would certainly be nice if people were to learn to write "human" dates
> more clearly!
>
> Lets ban those yearless dates, dd/mm/yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy sillyness and
> anything with two digit years!
Absolutely! Sorry, just seen that we're actually saying the same thing
here, so nice one.
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
__________________________________________________________
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