On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 11:36:22AM +0100, Sven Guckes wrote:
>* Simon White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-Maerz-13 09:04]:
>> Post 1999 you are adding to this confusion since the 2
>> digit year could also be interpreted as a month for the
>> next 10 years, and as a day for the next 29... and yymmdd,
>> yyddmm, mmddyy and ddmmyy are all configurations that are
>> parsed by the brain before concluding properly.
>
>blah.
>
>Sven

  OK, I wasn't going to be anal and join this thread, but I have to jump
in on this one.
  Simon's point deserves more than a "blah", and the fact that you went
in and edited his attribution lines with little digs (one of which I
removed) proves, to me anyway, that you're not looking at this
objectively.  Anyway, I can see from the thread that you can take it as
well as dish it out, so I'll just be blunt: your date format sucks.  OK,
so if we don't want your info fine...well, that would be a valid
argument except that this whole thread is about "usability" of
attribution lines, not RFC-compliance -- since afaik there is no RFC for
this and even if there were, that's not what we're talking about.  I
agree with you that attribution lines should include name/email/date
info now that you mention it and I'll be modifying my config accordingly
(as I did when David T-G informed me that the actual required quote
string is ">" and not "> " which mutt uses by default, shame on mutt).
From a "compliance" standpoint, your date is fine...by virtue of the
simple fact that there is no standard to comply with.  From a usability
standpoint, well, it gets the big bah.  None of the digit pairs is
distinguishable from the others.  Even if you forego machine
parseability and assume that 02 is 2002, there's still no way to tell
which of the other pairs is the month and which is the day, if the day
is below 13.
  Even the ISO format is somewhat lacking in this regard, since although
it is ambiguous in a vacuum, the fact is that people may not _know_ you
are using that format and so there is still ambiguity, although not a
failing of the format itself.
  It therefore follows that the only option out of the three that does
the job without any ambiguity at all is the one with an alpha data.
Yes, it's culturally biased, but I value that less than usability.  150
years from now someone will be able to look at Simon's attribution and
know exactly what date it specifies (although they may need a
dictionary).  Yours will be almost impossible to discern within a few
months, without relying on other people's attributions and/or entire
other messages in a thread.

  Oh, and you can feel free to edit my attribution to John "blind
elitist" Buttery in any replies...

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 John Buttery
                                     (Web page temporarily unavailable)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Attachment: msg25394/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to