[uf-discuss] human readable date parsing

[James Craig]

Tim Parkin wrote:

> With all of the discussion about iso dates being unreadable and  
> that an
> iso date isn't necessarily required when someone enters a date (i.e.
> saying 24th June doesn't translate into a single date, neither does
> 'thursday'). Shouldn't the focus be on trying to standardise date
> formats rather than trying to hide the iso date? If we can get a  
> parser
> to recognise 'human readable' dates (which *is* possible, if not  
> totally
> easy, http://labix.org/python-dateutil for a python version).

I disagree. If you try to make other, human readable formats into a  
standard, they will fall short when it comes time to internationaliz 
(s)e it. If you can come up with a better format readable to all  
machine and all humans in all languages, I'll recant.

I think the ISO 8601 is the best machine data format for the job. I  
just don't think it should be in abbr.

James