Stylesheets - Date formats, Re: Third test post of ciwas mFAQ

Author

Date formats, Re: Third test post of ciwas mFAQ

Alan J. Flavell

2004-07-23, 7:17 pm

I don't quite know why this detailed discussion point has taken off
in the course of reviewing the FAQ, but anyway...

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Dr John Stockton wrote:

> I've always used YYYY-MM-DD where the - characters use the - key and are
> encoded as a byte of value 45.
>
> But, having discovered style p { text-align: justify } , I tried it
> only to find that YYYY-MM-DD then often had a visual appearance rather
> resembling YYYY- MM- DD (I already knew that dates might appear as YYYY-
> MM-DD) which is really ugly.

> So is that just bad design, or a bug, in IE4;

Definitely the former (IE6 doesn't cause this problem); it's hard to
rate it as a "bug", since HTML specifications are somewhat vague on
the topic of wordbreaks in line folding and justifying. You'd need to
check the Unicode character properties to get an authoritative ruling.
But why bother? The software in question is never going to get fixed,
so either don't challenge it with stuff it can't handle (justified
text is unpleasant in screen display anyway), or just put up with that
antique software that you've decided to stick with, and stop making
such a fuss in public. Most IE users have long since moved on.

> Although your E-address is Niue (which, via NZ, puts you in the British
> Commonwealth <g> ), your TZ is -0200, which suggests EU.

(As if you didn't know, or at least would be capable of finding
out...)

> Obviously EU and other non-NA organisations need to reject US
> formatted numeric dates, except on one day per month.

As long as a 4-digit year is used, dates become unambiguous on and
after the 13th of every month, too. But 02/03/04 could be almost
anything!

Dr John Stockton

2004-07-24, 7:16 pm

JRS: In article <Pine.LNX.4.53.0407232006130.27000@ppepc56.ph.gla.ac.uk
>, dated Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:17:16, seen in news:comp.infosystems.www.au
thoring.stylesheets, Alan J. Flavell <flavell@ph.gla.ac.uk> posted :
>On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Dr John Stockton wrote:
>
>
>
>Definitely the former (IE6 doesn't cause this problem); it's hard to
>rate it as a "bug", since HTML specifications are somewhat vague on
>the topic of wordbreaks in line folding and justifying. You'd need to
>check the Unicode character properties to get an authoritative ruling.
>But why bother? The software in question is never going to get fixed,
>so either don't challenge it with stuff it can't handle (justified
>text is unpleasant in screen display anyway)

(that's a matter of opinion; it is at worst satisfactory when there are
always several words per complete line. Habitual book-readers with
adequate screens find the popularity of sans-serif far more annoying
that the presence/absence of proper justification.)

>, or just put up with that
>antique software that you've decided to stick with, and stop making
>such a fuss in public. Most IE users have long since moved on.

But not all. Consider charities, impecunious universities, the third
world, who may not be able to get new machines and may not want to risk
upgrading old but adequate machines with the latest software.

>
>As long as a 4-digit year is used, dates become unambiguous on and
>after the 13th of every month, too. But 02/03/04 could be almost
>anything!

A date such as 04/13/2004 should be rejected, since either it is a UK-
type typo or a US-style entry which one should not need to bother with
and which indicates probable error three weeks later on 05/04 / 04/05.
A MM/DD/YYYY date should always be rejected, but is sometimes absolutely
undetectable.

Of the six possible orders of numeric Y M D, I believe that only three
are ever used.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - w. FAQish topics, links, acronyms
PAS EXE etc : <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/> - see 00index.htm
Dates - miscdate.htm moredate.htm js-dates.htm pas-time.htm critdate.htm etc.

Alan J. Flavell

2004-07-24, 7:16 pm

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Dr John Stockton wrote:

>
> But not all. Consider charities,

I've never advocated doing anything unnecessarily harmful to older
browsers; but this is only cosmetics that you're whining about, and
unnecessary cosmetics at that. If "justify" causes problems, then
stop doing it. It's as simple as that.

> impecunious universities,

We gave the kiddies NN4.* on the old machines, for the obvious
security reasons... (that's some time back, though)

> the third world, who may not be able to get new machines

There just aren't enough old machines in existence to make much of an
impression on the third world, as far as I can see. Nevertheless, I
*still* wouldn't do anything unnecessarily harmful to old browsers.
Their users just have to live with the fact that old browsers don't
support current HTML, and their users may often have to cope with
cosmetic faults too. It's reality, so cope with it, and concentrate
on something substantive.

Chris Morris

2004-07-25, 7:15 am

Dr John Stockton <spam@merlyn.demon.co.uk> writes:
> (that's a matter of opinion; it is at worst satisfactory when there are
> always several words per complete line. Habitual book-readers with
> adequate screens find the popularity of sans-serif far more annoying
> that the presence/absence of proper justification.)

user.css
* { font-family: "MyFavouriteSerifFont" !important; }

--
Chris