[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working

[Jim Ley]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:14:16 +0100, George Lund <george at lund.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <851c8d31040715012725a3256a at mail.gmail.com>, Jim Ley
> <jim.ley at gmail.com> writes
> Of your examples, the two it didn't work for were "4th July 04" and
> "1.091574000e+12".  Of those two, I reckon 'twould be very rare for
> anyone to type the "th" and expect a computer to understand; 

I've seen it in logs....

>without the
> "th" it works fine.  The second I just didn't get the point of.  It
> isn't a date, it's a number.

The point of that one is that it's very often accepted by user agents
that use javascript new Date() constructs (and similar)

You've also dodged one of the points, all of those dates were the same
day, they are not parsed as the same day though.  I have a problem
with that.

> > please also
> >remember that reyling on regional settings is not something I've
> >generally seen developers do (for example if I'm using a web-cafe
> >machine, or even a desktop in the Bangalore office, how will the user
> >even know the local format to enter.)
> 
> Now that's just picking holes.  Your comment - to which I was replying -
> indicated that you *wanted* regional differences to be taken into
> account.

Did it?  I must've been pretty unclear, I thought I said that because
of regional differences it is unsafe to attempt to to parse a date
from a string unless you know the format entered.   I also don't think
there's anyway to know what format a user is entereing.

>  The whole point of all this is to give the user an experience
> that makes most sense to them in *their* context.

Well, perhaps, but I'm most concerned about the legacy clients, so it
has to work for those, now I've suggested a mechanism for datetime
that doesn't just degrade to text box (which is the big problem here)
but that's been rejected, now I've just got to make sure other people
are aware of the issues that I see with this very poor degradation.

> (Trust me, if you are trying to make a web browser in a foreign country
> work this would be the least of your worries.  Finding where the keys
> are on the keyboard is generally a bigger problem in my experience!)

Odd experience, did you spend your time in France or Dvorak-land ?

I've always found the pretty normal Qwerty keyboard about.

Cheers,

Jim.