Settings: date display option

[ninetydegrees]

Title:
Settings: date display option

Area:
settings

Summary:
We'll soon have the shiny 24h time display option. Can we please have something for dates?

Description:
Let users choose how they want dates to be displayed on the site (and in journals which haven't customized it?): yyyy-mm-dd (i.e. the current format), mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy.

I don't care about separators ( - or / or .) but being able to choose the order these are displayed in would be great. The current format isn't used in my country and I often confuse month and day.

Edit to clarify:

I'm suggesting it be implemented exactly the way the 24h option has been implemented: "this will respect the viewer's preferences in sitescheme pages, and whenever the journal owner has not customized the time for their journal."

Meaning that if someone's overridden the way time is displayed in their layout via Customize/Advanced Customizations, the viewer's own setting won't be applied. The same way you see one's chosen colors, chosen font size, etc. unless you use ?style=mine.

Comments suggest that some users would rather have their settings override all and any other user's settings/customizations. Discuss. :)

Poll #3304 Settings: date display option

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 52

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
36 (69.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
10 (19.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
2 (3.8%)

(I have no opinion)
3 (5.8%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.9%)

Comments

[dhobikikutti]

God yes. Day-Month-Year and metric while we're at it! ;)

[poulpette]

While I'd love dd-mm-yyyy, I find yyyy-mm-dd way less confusing than any permutation of mm-dd-yyyy.

My with change is for having the option persist across all pages of the site, and not just on one's own journal. 'cause that would really be confusing.

[feathertail]

My with change is for having the option persist across all pages of the site, and not just on one's own journal.

Agreed. That sounds like an important accessibility consideration, for users from countries where measurements are done differently from Dreamwidth's current default. Maybe we can have it auto-detect for new users while we're at it?

[kyrielle]

+1.

[ninetydegrees]

My with change is for having the option persist across all pages of the site, and not just on one's own journal. 'cause that would really be confusing.

That's what I'm suggesting I believe. *is confused* :)

[poulpette]

My bad then, I was still a bit asleep I confess. I suspect I was thrown off by the following bit: (and in journals which haven't customized it?).

[ninetydegrees]

I think we misunderstood each other.
When I said 'on the site', I meant site pages such as this one, where I'm commenting on (http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/350464.html#comments), and any other places where you've got dates such as Update, Shop, etc. When I said 'in journal which haven't customized it' I meant that your preferences would be applied to journals which have the default date format (some styles might allow you to choose which format you want the date to be displayed in or you may have customized it in a layer). Of course style=mine would negate that. That's how the 24h option was implemented.

[poulpette]

I think I understood correctly the first time then.

I'm fine with what you suggest, being able to customize the date format for the site-schemed pages as well as your own journal.
But I think that as long as we have the option to do that, we should also have the option to have that format supersede the format in other people's layout, to lessen the possibility of confusion across the site. Otherwise, you'll be used to encounter the format you specified for yourself and randomly have to deal with a format that confuses you (like mm-dd-yyyy does for me for example). And this would not lessen the confusion happening outside of site-schemed pages. Granted this is already possible so your idea is an improvement in any case.

I don't know, it makes more sense to me to have an option to unify the date format across the site for one user, than for only a few occurrences.

Actually I liken this type of option setting to the desired behaviour of the controlstrip css, which should go like this "user settings> owner settings> default settings". (As per the comments thread for bug 630)

[yvi]

I meant that your preferences would be applied to journals which have the default date format [...] Of course style=mine would negate that. That's how the 24h option was implemented.

It wasn't. It always follows viewer preferences, that's why it in the settings and not in the style options.

[ninetydegrees]

Then I think the commit description is very confusing. I'll edit the entry.

[yvi]

Sorry, reading sophie's reply, I suppose I just completely misinterpreted what you mean when you say "customize".

Yeah, I don't speak Styles :(

[ninetydegrees]

Oh so the commit description was right. If you override time display in your layout, the viewer's setting doesn't matter.

[sophie]

Are you sure? I'm not sure it's even possible to do that for all journals when it comes to S2 - unless something was also done to core2 to make it overrideable?

[yvi]

Of course the viewer's preference in this is overridable if a journal specifically sets the "timeformat_24" variable or defined a completely different way of displaying the time or something. But otherwise, S2.pm checks which option the remote viewer uses and passes that to core2. I wasn't completely precise, but it does not depend on whether the owner of the journal checked the "24 hours" option or not, which I understood to be meant with "and whenever the journal owner has not customized the time for their journal". Maybe I read that wrong, I don't know.

[matgb]

Agreed; I prefer the current default to anything that starts month (nothing happened in Nov '01, why do people keep talkinag about 9/11?).

Persistent for reader across site is best option, if possible, else set by journal for styled pages, but by reader preference on site scheme pages.

[syderia]

+1

ISO8601

[thorfinn]

There is a standard for time formatting. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Not saying that this should be the default, but it should definitely be an easily available option.

Re: ISO8601

[ninetydegrees]

This is the current format.

Re: ISO8601

[thorfinn]

That'll teach me to comment after I've had coffee, not before. :-) I even remember noticing the use of ISO8601 format as a big plus when I joined up with DW in the first place. Silly me.

[ratcreature]

If people can set it for their journals individually, would my site preference still override it? It would be really confusing if I couldn't tell whether someone picked month or day first if the year is last. With the year first otoh I have never seen the day to come after the year (i.e. yyyy-dd-mm is not something I've encountered, with the year first it always is year-month-day). So that is why I like the year first display. It's unambiguous.

If there is choice maybe the separators could be used to indicate which format was chosen? From what I gather the US with the odd month first quirk more often use mm/dd/yyyy with a slash while with day first it's more dd.mm.yyyy with a full stop as separator.

[ninetydegrees]

If people can set it for their journals individually, would my site preference still override it?

I think it wouldn't unless you would use style=mine. It seems to me date format is like colors. Like it, don't like it, users have the right to choose whatever they want for their journals. But style=mine should make it display however *you* want it.

[green_knight]

The really confusing thing is that my reading list displays June 3rd, 2010 (which I'm ok with, it leaves no room for guesswork about which is the month), but my own journal, and other people's journal, say 2010-6-03.

I'm all for customization options.

[cesy]

With changes - I want to see my preference wherever I'm viewing. Logged-out visitors should see the site standard of yyyy-mm-dd. I don't want someone else to be able to show me mm-dd-yyyy, which will confuse me.

[kerravonsen]

+1

[sorchasilver]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[susanreads]

+1

[laitaine]

Oh yes please, THIS.

[the_shoshanna]

I often find the current date format confusing - but at least it's consistent. Having to deal with multiple date formats (on my own journal, on journals that haven't customized their date formats, on journals that have customized their date formats, etc. etc.) would be much worse. If I am used to interpreting 5-6-10 as May 6, 2010, because that's how I have set my journal and that's how I think, then when I see 5-6-10 on another journal I'm not going to stop and wonder and work out whether that person has set their journal so that this number string means June 5; I'm just going to assume that it means May 6. Which it may not.

So I would only support this option if it overrode all other settings and I saw my chosen format everywhere. Or if all possible date formats forced the month to appear as text rather than digits, which removes pretty much all ambiguity, but that probably also removes much of the point of allowing people to customize their date formats -- it's not much of a customization if you can't display the month in digits if you want to.

[ninetydegrees]

Having to deal with multiple date formats (on my own journal, on journals that haven't customized their date formats, on journals that have customized their date formats, etc. etc.) would be much worse.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is exactly what the current situation is like.

Here, to me, the date is: 2010-06-02 (site-schemed page)
On your journal, the date is: 01/06/2010 (default date format in your style)
On my journal, the date is: May 9th, 2009 (customized date format)

I agree that this can be confusing but I don't think what I'm suggesting will make it even *more* confusing.

I'd also like to say that I'm not for or against imposing your custom format everywhere. However, it isn't how DW implemented the time format so it is my understanding that they seem to be reluctant to override users' custom journal settings and that's why I phrased my suggestion this way.

Discussion and suggestions for changes are very good, though. :)

[the_shoshanna]

Unless I'm mistaken, this is exactly what the current situation is like.

Huh, whoops, sorry! I remembered having to mentally translate date formats, but I don't remember seeing multiple formats here -- but I read on three journal sites so I probably see a lot of things and forget where I saw them, and am typing this on a treadmill so it's not as though I have a lot of brain at the moment. Apologies if I said something totally obvious; I hope my intent was clear even if my facts are screwy!

[ratcreature]

I have to admit though that I find the US convention of writing the day after the month in text quite awful as well. Even if it can't be misunderstood it looks ugly. I mean, my journal displays the date like that, but if I could pick I'd like to have it not say "June 3rd, 2010" but "3. June 2010" instead, because for me the day is always but in front of the month, not behind and no extra commas littered into dates either. I mean, I don't care enough to fiddle with my style in some advanced setting (I assume that could be done manually somehow as styles differ), but if it was just a ticky box somewhere I'd change it. And without choice, like now on the site scheme styled, I'd much rather have the yyyy-mm-dd formatting, even if this always seems technical to me, than months spelled out but arranged oddly.

+1

[roximonoxide]

I would also like to see this implemented with additional options for combinations such dd-mm and mm-dd without the year.