[uf-discuss] human readable date parsing

[Tim Parkin]

James Craig wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, indeed.. And I was wrong to say "shouldn't the focus be".. I was
just approaching the problem from a different angle to see if it looked
more tractable, not from this angle obviously :-)

In the vein of approaching things from a totally different angle, how
about using hidden input field for the value? (I realise there are many
problems with this but it might be worth documenting some of the
negatives for future reference - I'm happy to start by saying Visual
Developers propensity to formify the whole page could cause issues.. but
then again VD may just be an issue in itself).

Tim