[Sigia-l] display of date in multilanguage portal

[Jon Hanna]

> We've been tossing around a question here regarding the
> presentation of the
> date and whether it should be tied to a user's language
> selection. So, if a
> user can choose to view a portal application in English (US), English (UK)
> or, say, German, should the presentation format of the date change
> accordingly? Should the date in the user's account history or email inbox,
> for example, be presented as MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY or DD.MM.YYYY,
> depending on the selected language? Note that there are differences beyond
> the order in which the values appear (e.g. the separating character is
> sometimes different from locale to locale).

One problem with the Internet is that the user has such regular contact with
sites getting it wrong that s/he doesn't necessarily know when you've got it
right.
Hence even if you correctly identify that I would use the DD/MM/YYYY format
I can't be sure if 04/03/2005 is the fourth of March because I can't be sure
that you've correctly identified the format I would want.
Hence 4<sup>th</sup> March 2005 would be the way to go (it's that little bit
prettier as well).

If you have a *need* for the brevity of a numeric date then use the W3C
profile of ISO 8601. It's unambiguous, requires no translation between being
used in that context and as a date value in HTML or XML, and is the standard
date format, or close to it in most countries (e.g. ANSI X3.30 in the US
uses a slightly different ISO 8601 profile) even if it isn't conventionally
used in them.