--On Saturday, March 13, 2010 07:51 -0700 Cullen Jennings
<fluffy(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
I just got abused by someone reading the IESG web pages and
pointing out dates like 2010-01-02 , are confusing. Is there a
better way to do dates that we should be using on the ietf.org
web pages?
First of all, while there have been many efforts to make that
ambiguous, there really is an international standard that
specifies dates in strict little-endian order (e.g., YYYYMMDD)
with optional delimiters (hyphen is now specified, but period
and maybe some other things were, if I recall, permitted in
earlier versions of the standard). Because of national
conventions, variations, and plain stupidity, all [other]
formats suffer from at least one of three problems:
(1) Dependency on particular languages, e.g., 1 Jan 2002.
(2) Visual confusability of particular characters in
common fonts, e.g., 1 II 2010 could easily be
mistaken, with the wrong choice of fonts, for 1 11 2020.
(Curiously, while the appearance of Roman numerals most
often indicates a month, I've occasionally seen the
equivalent of XXI 1 2010 and its permutations in the
wild.)
(3) The permutation problem, which gets particularly
severe if two-digit years are used, and which is the
source of the ambiguity you point out.
IMO, if we have a problem (and, if members of the community are
confused, we probably do), the best solution is a short note on
relevant pages (perhaps even in the footer of every page) that
says, e.g., "In accordance with International Standards, all
dates on IETF web pages are either spelled out in full or in ISO
8601 format, i.e., YYYY-MM-DD". It is not trying to swap out
one ambiguous format for another one that might be slightly less
(or slightly more) ambiguous.
john
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