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

[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)