Re: Balsa web site at http://www.balsa.net/download.html

[Matthias Andree <matthias andree stud uni-dortmund de>]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Scott Tyson wrote:

> Why would it be important to have a date presentation on a website be
> in compliance with an ISO standard?  I like it using the dots myself.
> Its different thus showing the page author has some creativity and we
> should allow him/her to express themselves appropiatly.  If for some
> reason you cannot read the date then that is a different issue.  Also
> coming from the states the date is backwards but I'm not going to
> worry about that.  The author of the site is not from the states so
> he/she can do whatever they want with it  When in Rome......  I vote
> for leaving it as is an allowing the webmaster some creative freedoms.

<RANT> (No insult intended. I don't know you personally, I'm not going
to judge your attitudes.) The attitude you show is exactly the reason
why there have been problems and there will be problems in international
communication, and why future NASA missions will fail again: because
people don't give a dime for conformance. They give a shit on the metric
system. They give a shit on international communication. They feel they
are the world and dates are unimportant. Wrong. But let NASA crash other
research vehicles on planets... (of course, there's more to it than just
not using the metric system, it's about carelessness, less money, less
importance in a more peaceful world) and so on.  </RANT>

<AD>The ISO standard is an INTERNATIONAL standard, meant for INTERNATIONAL
communication. It's a good standard. It heeds the MSB first order that
you use everywhere else, which has various advantages.</AD>

As if Y2k troubles had not been enough (Y2k did not hit hard enough for
people to recognize what's going wrong): IF someone is writing 01.04.03
- how do you tell if it's: March 4th, 2001; April 3rd, 2001; April
fool's day, 2003; January 4th, 2003 or 1 h, 4 min, 3 s past midnight?

You don't. You can't.

With dashes and 4-digit year, you can safely assume the date is in
ISO8601 format which is ALWAYS YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD, and the time
always carries a colon. It will avoid misunderstandings. That's what
that particular standard is for. It's a good standard.


There's simply no excuse apart from laziness. If you are saying "if
you'd like ISO dates, go change yourself", I'll happily download all the
balsa web pages, fix them and send a context or unified diff to the
maintainer. It's a matter of a few lines of a regexp-enabled script
language (Perl exemplum gratiae).

-- 
Matthias Andree