Do we, as developers, have a UI responsibility?
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Some developers are rebellious, and the guy (or girl, or gender neutral being) who thought up the US date format was probably just doing it to irritate us europeans !
RickZeeland wrote:
probably just doing it to irritate us europeans !
In that case, I shall restore my support for the mm/dd/yyyy format!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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That's acute one.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
Maybe, but there are degrees of cute. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
The question seems a bit odd to me in that, since I never went to computer school, I always assumed the point of a UI is to give the user what they want. I've often returned SQL date, for example, as, LEFT(datefield, 11), which gave MMM DD, YYYY automatically (as long as one remembers to sort by the real datetime values). Or, really, anything else the user needs to look at should be made intelligible. Otherwise, the calls come in and it has to be changed. From my point of view, the European convention, dd-mm-yyyy (regardless of delimiters) is every bit as dumb as the US convention: it won't sort correctly with a pain in the ass. So - I've taken to YYYYMMDD, or, for human readable, YYYY.MM.DD, when it's for my use. Big Endian, I think, is surely the way to go for dates.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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Maybe, but there are degrees of cute. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
This is just going to go around in circles.
cheers Chris Maunder
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
My problem with the dd/mm/yy format is there's a lot less numbers you make into math holidays. :) In speaking the dates, Americans tend to say something along the lines of "August 4, 2017", in which case our format of mm/dd/yy makes sense. Do you non-Americans say it differently?
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This is just going to go around in circles.
cheers Chris Maunder
I have a bone to pick with you - my radius. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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This is just going to go around in circles.
cheers Chris Maunder
Shirley you mean 2π rads.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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My problem with the dd/mm/yy format is there's a lot less numbers you make into math holidays. :) In speaking the dates, Americans tend to say something along the lines of "August 4, 2017", in which case our format of mm/dd/yy makes sense. Do you non-Americans say it differently?
I saw a video on this subject recently and this is why US dates are presented as MM/dd/yyyy rather than the more common dd/MM/yyyy. Apparently it became common practice in the US to state dates as August 3rd or December 15th rather than the other way around and that translated into the short form that is used to express a date. You get used to it. You never like it, but you learn to live with it.
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I have a bone to pick with you - my radius. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
:) That's pretty humerus.
cheers Chris Maunder
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:) That's pretty humerus.
cheers Chris Maunder
Are you trying to strong arm me? /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
ISO 8601 or go home!
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
Obviously, there are at least 3 parts to this: 0) How the data is handled in the back-end. 1) How the data is entered on the front-end. 2) If and how "1" is labelled on the UI. Given your subject line it seems you're more interested at the moment in 2. If the whole world had one method then problem solved - no label required. Unfortunately, all 7.5 billion* of us can't agree on much of anything so the data needs to be labelled. Just treat it like anything that has a unit of measure. Mass, volume, speed, temperature, etc... *Or should I write 7,500,000,000? Or is that 7500000,000? Or is that 75,00,00,00,00? Or is that 7.5 x 109 Or should I write 7.5 milliard?
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. ~ Mark Twain
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Some developers are rebellious, and the guy (or girl, or gender neutral being) who thought up the US date format was probably just doing it to irritate us europeans !
Why Do Americans Write Dates: Month-Day-Year? - YouTube[^] TLDW: No one knows but we've been doing it since colonizing NA. Personally I only usually care about the month and current day of the week. The specific day and year are largely irrelevant day-to-day. Maybe that's why? Just a guess.
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
In short yes. But also we have a responsibility to the user in particular rather than just anyone willy-nilly. The fact is, people will always find a away to disagree on stuff globally. It helps us feel unique. And in fact it's quite healthy, otherwise we'd all be mindless zombies never challenging or changing the status quo. Of course, it's all about balance, otherwise we as people would never agree on anything and thus never get anywhere as well. So, in short, stuff like date format is context sensitive. It's why we have locales, etc. But you're right in the fact we as UI designers need to make certain things obvious. There are ways to do it, just a lot of people are lazy and only do the bare minimum. I recently had a JSON feed with UTC dates in it... UTC dates mind you!! The feed tried to get all fancy with dashes to make it look like an ISO format too. But no, the person that made the feed put it in as mm-dd-YYYY - dashes not slashes. Lets overlook the fact a UTC date should never be formatted this way IMO, but this dude is apparently anti-slash and anti-YYYY-mm-dd. :wtf: Point being, the dashes are a hint for most normal people it should be an ISO date. And in a way that's like what the UI should try to accomplish, find ways to give us hints and visual cues about something. When done properly it helps tremendously. As in don't clutter up the screen with information overload. Find ways to make them subtle. And another way of helping people figure it out is to give the user what the user expects to see in the first place, depending on its context. Anyway, hopefully in the future paper receipts will be digital and they'll account for this kinda stuff.
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
Particularly annoying with receipt printers is that the processor (the company that handles the CC transaction) often dictates the format of the receipt in case of a dispute, including the date format, specifically so that it is unambiguous to them. At least, such was the case when I had to generate the receipts for CC purchases and check cashing. Marc
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
I don't display dates in
mm/dd/yyunless the stake holder demands it. I always prefer to usedd-MMM-yyyyfor the very reason you cite.".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
not forgetting degrees (temperature) and degrees angle. The latter is odd because almost all humans use the 0..360 whereas almost every math library uses radians - easy to visualise a 35 degree slope, but a .4 radians is how many? With pi an irrational number and computers not capable of doing infinite digits yet (not that long ago computers couldn't do over 6 dp very well) what a stupid choice that was. Another that's slipping is currency: starting to see single decimals popping up: i.e. $5.5 ... sure cents (pennies if you must) are annoying, but it's just being lazy to skip that last digit. (currently the temperature here is 298 degrees and my chair tilted at about .1 degrees, just the way this grumpy irrational old man likes it.)
Sin tack the any key okay
We use radians because the constants in (naively implemented) math libraries are inverses of integers. As all serious math libraries use economised polynomials, this is less of a problem these days. Note that IEEE 754-2008 recommends functions such as sinPi, defined as sin(pi*x). This could easily be modified to take angles in degrees, grads, mils, etc.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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The question seems a bit odd to me in that, since I never went to computer school, I always assumed the point of a UI is to give the user what they want. I've often returned SQL date, for example, as, LEFT(datefield, 11), which gave MMM DD, YYYY automatically (as long as one remembers to sort by the real datetime values). Or, really, anything else the user needs to look at should be made intelligible. Otherwise, the calls come in and it has to be changed. From my point of view, the European convention, dd-mm-yyyy (regardless of delimiters) is every bit as dumb as the US convention: it won't sort correctly with a pain in the ass. So - I've taken to YYYYMMDD, or, for human readable, YYYY.MM.DD, when it's for my use. Big Endian, I think, is surely the way to go for dates.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
W∴ Balboos wrote:
Big Endian, I think, is surely the way to go for dates.
Agreed. Especially if some decent delimiter is used (something like -/.) it is as readable, usable, workable, and consistent as possible. And thus it ends up with the best of all worlds - easy to sort, consistent for storage, no ambiguity, straight-forward, as well as easy to pick up the day/month as well. I mean how difficult is it to read the last 4 digits of a date instead of the first 4? For me, I try to use the ISO standard date format as much as possible. Though for display I would try to convert to whatever local setting is in effect. But for storage and working with dates, especially if working on text based dates, there is simply no alternative to ISO standard (even allowing for variations in time zones for DateTime data). Here's the irritating thing though: Most programs are designed for the US market. Thus most are then by default showing the US-only (not counting some small country somewhere wanting to be "different too" - now that sounds oxi-mor-ish) "randomised" date format. And no, the US is not the largest part of the world, not by a long shot. Meaning until the user (the largest part of users throughout the world) has realised that the date is in some unexpected rearranged order, they're reading it wrong to begin with. IMO the default (if not more properly displaying to user preferences) should be ISO (i.e. YYYY-MM-DD) as it is impossible to misinterpret, there's never something like YYYY-DD-MM, or at least not that I've come across. So even if someone's used to DD-MM-YY, or for the US "non-world"-citizen's MM-DD-YY, it's quick to pick up exactly what is meant (especially if sticking to the 4 digit year).
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
During the US military attack on Iraq in 2003, Amercians renamed (or tried to do so) "french fries" to "freedom fries" to indicate their dissatisfaction with French opposition to the bombings. I think that a nice similar political action, in these days of terrorism from the Arabic world, would be to reverse the digit order in our numbers. Our digits are, as most people know, Arabic numerals - exactly the same as the digits used in Arabic writing. Except that in Arabic, they are little endian, in Latin script they are big endians: We write them the same, but the Arabs read them from right to left, we read them from left to right. To clearly dissociate from Arab culture, we should reverse the digit order, and reject doing it "the Arab way". This of course pinpoints another problem: By trying to be different from the Arabs, by writing numbers the other way around, in another sense it makes us more like them! They do it little endian, we change to little endian, too... Hmmmm....
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I'm going through expenses, and for anyone living in Canada who doesn't have that weird Canada / US hardware translation unit built into their brain, it's painful. It's the dates. The US, alone, uses mm/dd/yy. The rest of the world except for Belize uses something vaguely sensible. Even Canada. Except Canada has a ton of systems imported directly from the US (or shares systems with their US parent companies) so lots of dates on things like receipts are in the form mm/dd/yy. Or they are dd/mm/yy. You can't tell. 06/07/17. Guess the date. Canadians can tell, just by looking at the date whether it's June or July. To me that's impossible yet they seem to do it. Somewhere a programmer decided to output the date this way. Either they just used the default date formatter or they deliberately choose a dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format. 5 seconds of work would enable them to output in dd-MMM-yyyy or dd-MMM-yy or even yyyy-mm-dd or yy-mm-dd format. Either of which would allow a high level of accuracy in guessing the date. I'm sure they also thought, at the time, that their decision was a valid one. It wasn't, and it made me wonder whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously. Is this something you do? Is it something your lead actually stops you doing? Or is it something you've not really though of?
cheers Chris Maunder
The real goal is to switch everybody to yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. 2017-08-07). 1. It contains all the needed information. 2. It's good for sorting because it goes bigger --> smaller. 3. No one would get confused over which number means what (bigger --> smaller principle). 4. It's already used by 1.5 billion Chinese and possibly in other places in Asia too. While we're at it, we should also switch to a 24H clock (basically for the same reasons). If you like it: use it in your daily life! You might still want to use mm/dd/yy on your IRS reports, but other than that - use it whenever you can and by god we will make the world unite around this one proper date/time format.