My plea to all Developers
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I see that as less of an issue as it is not (usually[1]) prone to lack of clarity as dd-mm vs. mm-dd is. One can measure accurately in Imperial or Metric, so it's purely a matter of personal preference. I see nothing inherently idiotic about Imperial. It's quirky and inconsistent but then so are many things. Footnote:- 1: Yes, yes, I know that some very expensive things have blown up or gone off course due to Metric/Imperials mixups. But that was due to lack of project management clarity and QC/QA, rather than the existence of two measurement systems.
Metric will only be complete when there's a metric calendar, a metric clock, and a metric angular measurement.
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
I just use ISO 8601 UTC date/time for technical communication and in the cases the date/time should be stored as a string - when stored as a date (without time zone information), I store it as UTC. For display, I just use the settings of the user - show it in his/her format and time zone.
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
Yes! I even write ISO 8601 format on personal correspondence, check (yes, checks!), etc.
But I still have to deal with files at work that come in MM-dd-yy format - yes, using dashes "-" instead of slashes, and others that are dd-MM-yy, so it's ambiguous when read in context for various countries.
Hello all specification authors! Don't invent a new format! Just Don't! I've never seen anyone get confused reading ISO 8601 format
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
I have spent far too much time "correcting" data from US sources. It is frustrating.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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I know what you mean, I cannot visualise things in metric sizes I have to convert them mentally to feet and inches ( or whatever ), metric can be ambiguous to, some people say ( usually related to the building trade ) you need a 60*40 or a 600*400 - there is no ambiguity in you need something 2 foot by three foot.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
I live in Canada and have been using metric since grade school. That being said, I still buy 2x4's for framing, and sheets of plywood come in 4x8 sheets. The crazy thing is that our plywood is often 4x8 sheet by 5mm.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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Canada is metric. That's why all temperatures are in F, weights in lb and heights in feet and inches. :doh:
cheers Chris Maunder
... and we buy plywood in 4'x8' x 5.0mm sheets.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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... and we buy plywood in 4'x8' x 5.0mm sheets.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
I think my favourite over here is Tirecentre. Talk about culture collision.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
I'll think about, but leaning towards OK. Maybe I should call rivers "River Mississippi" instead of Mississippi River as well. Just kidding ...
If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
D/M/Y Surely? Question: Why *do* Americans use M/D/Y? Totally wierd. Low to high (chronologically): D/M/Y. Today is 07/04/2021 Either 4'th of July. Or 7'th of April. Each to their own, though...
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Please, for the love of all things good in this world Stop using mm/dd/yyyy for the numerical date format Only the US, US jurisdictions, and Swahili in Kenya use this format, so 6/7/2021 means two completely different things to someone in the US and someone in the UK. Or NZ, Or Oz. Or, well, anywhere else really. Please: make dates unambiguous. Use month abbreviations like 6-Jul. Use yyyy-mm-dd if you have to. Or go crazy and sniff a user's preferences but that doesn't actually work because everyone in the US seems to think Canada uses the US format. Canada doesn't use the US format: It merely understands the US format which I find astounding. Show a Canadian 6/7 and they'll tell you the correct interpretation without context. It's a skill akin to national mind reading and I do not understand how they do it.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder I understand your concern But my question is why not harvest the IP address and make a decision the date format that would be favorable for that location YES VPN use will render this UI design less than desirable Just a thought from a novice so please feel free to correct my thinking or lack of experience In my profession we used metric to compound pharmaceuticals so I guess a lot depends on if your web site or product is used or reviewed by multiple countries
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Chris Maunder I understand your concern But my question is why not harvest the IP address and make a decision the date format that would be favorable for that location YES VPN use will render this UI design less than desirable Just a thought from a novice so please feel free to correct my thinking or lack of experience In my profession we used metric to compound pharmaceuticals so I guess a lot depends on if your web site or product is used or reviewed by multiple countries
Choroid wrote:
why not harvest the IP address and make a decision
It's not about location (which is unreliable to guess and unavailable in many instances). It's about culture. If I'm travelling in the US (in some distant Utopian future) that doesn't mean once I cross the border I suddenly understand that 4/7 means 7 Apr instead of 4 Jul. Why not simply spell the date out. 4 Jul 2021 is not much longer than 7/4/2021.
cheers Chris Maunder
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But all the measurements are based on real objects that exist in the world about us. The metric system is just random numbers. For example who can remember (or visualise) that one meter is the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second?
Units are an attempt to codify something physical into a value. For things that people use every day in casual life, the best units are those that are easily visualized or understood. This is because those same people will whine in school about having to take geometry or trigonometry and then get bamboozled by a contractor because they didn't know how to do math. Making units easily quantified by things in every day use and you won't end up with a building that was built for you at half scale. In designing trajectories in the solar system, I use astronaumical units (AU) more than any other unit of distance except when performing a flyby, in which case I wouldn't care if I measured the altitude in km or mi or even nmi, but am usually dictated to use km. Fahrenheit is useful for describing human comfort. It expands the scale where humans live. Much below zero degrees F really sucks even with extra clothing and just breathing in starts to hurt. Much above 100 degrees also really sucks as you can't shuck many extra clothes to feel comfortable. A foot is about the length of an adults foot, which makes it easy to walk off a distance. Pounds make no sense. Many imperial units are easy to estimate by using the human body, which is how a lot of imperial units came to being. They don't make doing math problems in physics easy. MPH isn't particularly relatable when driving a car and you just have to calibrate it, but neither is kph. Because I've converted it enough I know that 40 degrees C sucks and I know that somewhere -20 degrees C also sucks. However, that really is only 60 degrees C of describing comfort. There is a big difference in an 80 degree F day and a 60 degree F day. Even between 72 degree F and 78 degree F you can easily feel the difference in comfort. A better unit for measuring human comfort would probably center around 72F with positive numbers being warmer than optimum comfort and negative numbers being colder than optimum comfort and be about the size of a degree F but maybe a little bigger. C is useful for cooking since 100C is the boiling point of water at sea level, but since a lot of the world is above sea level even that isn't super useful, but better than a random number like 212F. A meter isn't particularly useful at measuring things in the casual life of a human other than saying that human adults are typically between 1.5 and 2 meters tall. Grams don't make a lot of sense and you have to raise it to a kilogram to be useful to visualize in human life. PSI is pretty useless, but so is pascal
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Yes. And I wish the USA will bite the bullet for once and all and drop the idiotic imperial system and go METRIC!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Why don't we just go back to the old units of measurement? We still measure horses in hands. Drinks are measured out in fingers. We should bring back the ell, the cubit, the palm and the digits. Add to that the carucate, the hide, the oxgang, the virgate, the yardland, and the quinaria. Do people still use the barleycorn for measuring shoe sizes? How about the lachter or the button? Don't forget the line, the page, the rod, the step, and the stadion. I think weights are still sometimes measured in bags, are they not? The Dutch cask is used for measuring butter and cheese, I think. How about the duella, the keel, the lot, the mark, the pennyweight, the roll, the room, the sarpler, the slug, the tod, the truss, and the whey. I could go on and on (and on and on and on) but I think I've put just about everyone asleep by now. The point is, if you are going to be sending code or data where it may need to be read by other cultures, either choose an international standard, or just document what standard you are using and let the user use their brain (or a calculator) from there. standards of time and measurement come and go. Some stay longer than others. All have their advantages and disadvantages. It all depends on the context of its use, and the primary audience. Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
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Quote:
Probably to feast the Big Macs!
That's never going to happen. McDonald's was a nice little burger place until the corporate criminal got involved and this is probably a metaphor for all that is wrong with the US today. However, since politics is frowned upon here I will avoid any further escalation of your deluded ranting! ;P
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
There lies the big misconception most people have. The reality is that McDonald's is a real estate investment company, that just happens to also sell burgers on their properties. :cool: Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
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Units are an attempt to codify something physical into a value. For things that people use every day in casual life, the best units are those that are easily visualized or understood. This is because those same people will whine in school about having to take geometry or trigonometry and then get bamboozled by a contractor because they didn't know how to do math. Making units easily quantified by things in every day use and you won't end up with a building that was built for you at half scale. In designing trajectories in the solar system, I use astronaumical units (AU) more than any other unit of distance except when performing a flyby, in which case I wouldn't care if I measured the altitude in km or mi or even nmi, but am usually dictated to use km. Fahrenheit is useful for describing human comfort. It expands the scale where humans live. Much below zero degrees F really sucks even with extra clothing and just breathing in starts to hurt. Much above 100 degrees also really sucks as you can't shuck many extra clothes to feel comfortable. A foot is about the length of an adults foot, which makes it easy to walk off a distance. Pounds make no sense. Many imperial units are easy to estimate by using the human body, which is how a lot of imperial units came to being. They don't make doing math problems in physics easy. MPH isn't particularly relatable when driving a car and you just have to calibrate it, but neither is kph. Because I've converted it enough I know that 40 degrees C sucks and I know that somewhere -20 degrees C also sucks. However, that really is only 60 degrees C of describing comfort. There is a big difference in an 80 degree F day and a 60 degree F day. Even between 72 degree F and 78 degree F you can easily feel the difference in comfort. A better unit for measuring human comfort would probably center around 72F with positive numbers being warmer than optimum comfort and negative numbers being colder than optimum comfort and be about the size of a degree F but maybe a little bigger. C is useful for cooking since 100C is the boiling point of water at sea level, but since a lot of the world is above sea level even that isn't super useful, but better than a random number like 212F. A meter isn't particularly useful at measuring things in the casual life of a human other than saying that human adults are typically between 1.5 and 2 meters tall. Grams don't make a lot of sense and you have to raise it to a kilogram to be useful to visualize in human life. PSI is pretty useless, but so is pascal
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Metric will only be complete when there's a metric calendar, a metric clock, and a metric angular measurement.
Metric Angular Measure: Gradian. One down, two to go... :-)
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I know what you mean, I cannot visualise things in metric sizes I have to convert them mentally to feet and inches ( or whatever ), metric can be ambiguous to, some people say ( usually related to the building trade ) you need a 60*40 or a 600*400 - there is no ambiguity in you need something 2 foot by three foot.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
You can visualize imperial units because you grew up with them. If you used metric all the time you'd be able to visualize it quickly enough. If you dropped the units on your 2x3 like you did on your metric measurements then you'd be just as confused (is that 2"x3" or 2'x3'? And yes, I have run into just this problem when ordering materials online.) The solution is don't drop the units! (Make it 60cmx40cm or 600mmx400mm)
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Metric will only be complete when there's a metric calendar, a metric clock, and a metric angular measurement.
Shortly after the revolution in France there was a suggestion that the week should have 10 days, the day 10 hours and the hour 100 minutes. This was abandoned quickly. The people only had one or two free days every 10 days, so they rebelled, and all timekeeping devices would have to be swapped out. One sensible suggestion was that the year should have 12 months of 30 days plus 5 or 6 epagomenal days per year at the end of a month. One still sees calculators with 100° in a quadrant as an option
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Choroid wrote:
why not harvest the IP address and make a decision
It's not about location (which is unreliable to guess and unavailable in many instances). It's about culture. If I'm travelling in the US (in some distant Utopian future) that doesn't mean once I cross the border I suddenly understand that 4/7 means 7 Apr instead of 4 Jul. Why not simply spell the date out. 4 Jul 2021 is not much longer than 7/4/2021.
cheers Chris Maunder
Quote:
spell the date out. 4 Jul 2021
I concur. For readability this is how it is best displayed. Internally, "20210704" makes more sense but should never be needed on the display - for example, column sorting can be done using the value not the text of the field.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Units are an attempt to codify something physical into a value. For things that people use every day in casual life, the best units are those that are easily visualized or understood. This is because those same people will whine in school about having to take geometry or trigonometry and then get bamboozled by a contractor because they didn't know how to do math. Making units easily quantified by things in every day use and you won't end up with a building that was built for you at half scale. In designing trajectories in the solar system, I use astronaumical units (AU) more than any other unit of distance except when performing a flyby, in which case I wouldn't care if I measured the altitude in km or mi or even nmi, but am usually dictated to use km. Fahrenheit is useful for describing human comfort. It expands the scale where humans live. Much below zero degrees F really sucks even with extra clothing and just breathing in starts to hurt. Much above 100 degrees also really sucks as you can't shuck many extra clothes to feel comfortable. A foot is about the length of an adults foot, which makes it easy to walk off a distance. Pounds make no sense. Many imperial units are easy to estimate by using the human body, which is how a lot of imperial units came to being. They don't make doing math problems in physics easy. MPH isn't particularly relatable when driving a car and you just have to calibrate it, but neither is kph. Because I've converted it enough I know that 40 degrees C sucks and I know that somewhere -20 degrees C also sucks. However, that really is only 60 degrees C of describing comfort. There is a big difference in an 80 degree F day and a 60 degree F day. Even between 72 degree F and 78 degree F you can easily feel the difference in comfort. A better unit for measuring human comfort would probably center around 72F with positive numbers being warmer than optimum comfort and negative numbers being colder than optimum comfort and be about the size of a degree F but maybe a little bigger. C is useful for cooking since 100C is the boiling point of water at sea level, but since a lot of the world is above sea level even that isn't super useful, but better than a random number like 212F. A meter isn't particularly useful at measuring things in the casual life of a human other than saying that human adults are typically between 1.5 and 2 meters tall. Grams don't make a lot of sense and you have to raise it to a kilogram to be useful to visualize in human life. PSI is pretty useless, but so is pascal
A few years ago I was writing a model importer for GIS data (geographic information systems), and that turned out to be an education in measurement systems. Prior to that, I thought that the USA had, in a sense, already "gone metric" since 1 foot is defined as precisely 0.3048 meters. That's not a rounded-off approximation, that's a precise definition. But it turns out that that's merely the "international foot." In contrast, the "US survey foot" is defined as precisely 12/39.37 meters (1 US survey inch defined as precisely 1/39.37 meters). The conversion factors are almost but not quite equal, and the differences accumulate when measuring the Earth. There are several other definitions of "foot" around the world. The other things I learned (I knew them before, but then I learned them) are: 1) The Earth isn't a sphere; it's an ellipsoid. 2) The Earth isn't an ellipsoid; it's a geoid. 3) Latitude is defined by the normal vector at the surface, not the central vector to the surface. 4) Double-precision coordinates are essential everywhere. 5) Defining a meter as a precise fraction of the distance between the equator and a pole was bound to fail at some point. 6) We're still left with arbitrary-looking conversion factors from "natural units" (such as the speed of light) to MKS units (meters and seconds) -- but with many more digits due to the greater precision.
