2013/1/23 Serge Wroclawski <emac...@gmail.com> > On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 4:32 AM, Janko Mihelić <jan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > It shouldn't be too hard to make a JOSM add-on that converts 3 letters > into > > 2. So that's no problem. > > You seem to be not seeing the point. > > Two letter days of the week (DOW) may be standard in German, and > that's fine. But the tags we use in OSM are in English. They aren't in > an abstracted system which we then render- we use English and then > codify from there. It's what many software projects do, and it's what > we do. > > So then we must ask "What is the standard way of representing a day of > the week in English?". The way is to look at a standard, such as the > locale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale) > > So if you look at your locale from a *nix system- you will see the > abday, and you will see unicode encoded strings that show the day of > the week. > > Since that is a pain to look at, we can use Python to help us: > > >>> import time > >>> time.strftime("%a") > 'Wed' > > If you aren't familiar with Python (or the C it borrows from), > strftime prints out the time, and I've given it the parameter to > display the shortened day of the week, according the locale (in my > case, en_US). >
Agreed, that's what C and Python do. On the other hand, there are many examples of two-letters encoding in real life. In Italian it's common to see Lu, Ma, Me, Gi, Ve, Sa, Do, even though it is more widely used the three-letters variant Lun, Mar, Mer, Gio, Ven, Sab, Dom. But you won't take that as a good reason - you refer to English. I used to have a VCR, like twenty years ago, whose UI (all of the five 7-segment LCD characters) was in English. The lights that indicated DOW read Mo, Tu, We, Th, Fr, Sa, Su. > I'm not about to say that whether we use three letters or two is the > end of the world, but I will say that we should strive to use things > that are standard- things that are defined elsewhere. Doing so will > make it easier for folks to use the software, but also easier for > programmers to have something they expect. > I see with your point, and I agree that this is not the most important decision to take. But the two-letters encoding is unambiguous and easy enough to implement (encoding/decoding is just a map of key/values), just like the three-letters version. None of them has a clear advantage, except that opening_hours already uses the two-letters version. Regards, Simone
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