Re: L-date fields

["Kahn, David" <KAHN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Neil Palmer (NPalmer@NxTrend.com) wrote:

>What is 04-06-1997 ?   April 6th 1997 ?  Not necessarily.  In Europe it
>would be 04 June 1997.  However when you see 1997-04-06 is there any
>doubt that this is April 4th 1997 ?
>As we move towards a global economy, isn't it about time we all started
>writing dates the same way ?  I say give the users yyyy-mm-dd and don't
>take any crap from them !

Actually, this is a very valid point. I'd love all displayed and printed
dates to be in yyyy-mm-dd form, but I think there would be strong user
resistance.

An American company with a very large UK subsidiary where I worked for a
time used either the mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy format depending which
country's MIS department had produced the report. As these reports were
often distributed both ways across the Atlantic the scope for confusion
was enormous. My solution was to print the month as a 3 character
abbreviation. It then didn't matter whether you saw 04 Jun 1997 or Jun
04 1997: no ambiguity, and psychologically more acceptable to most users
than yyyy-mm-dd.

Dave Kahn - TCO, Tengiz, Kazakstan
=========

e-mail:  kahn@tengizchevroil.com    (until September 30th)
         dkahn@cix.compulink.co.uk  (from  October 1st)

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