Improve date readibility

[skinny97214]

Currently the events page uses YYYY-MM-DD which has two problems. First, the year is first, so if you scan down the left edge you see only years which is not very useful. Second, there is month/day ambiguity between US and the rest of the world, so I'm not sure whether this is April 9th or September 4th.

Current: 2014-04-09
Desired: 09 April 2014

[aaronpk]

Gregor is working on a much better looking template for events! In-progress screenshot below.

[tantek]

Agreed about the scanning down the left edge and seeing the same year.

Disagreed about month/day ambiguity in ISO Dates. When W3C i18n group user-tested YYYY-MM-DD dates it was consistently unambigously interpreted correctly as year, month, day. Absent the year, yes, just "MM-DD" is a problem. But that's not what we're using.

I'd prefer to keep things numerical rather than using English-centric month-names. We're trying to appeal to a broader International community, and YYYY-MM-DD dates are the most readable worldwide of any format across languages etc.

[skinny97214]

Are we doing anything else for localization outside of dates?

[aaronpk]

There are actually several articles in several other languages: http://indiewebcamp.com/other-languages

@gRegorLove did you ever end up making any more progress on that event template?

[gRegorLove]

It's about 90% functional. To get around MediaWiki restrictions on using template variables in time elements, it's using value-class pattern and there's some display: none being used, unfortunately. I believe it's parsing correctly, though. See http://indiewebcamp.com/Template:one-day-event and http://indiewebcamp.com/User:Gregorlove.com/sandbox

One thing that still needs to be done is wrapping multiple locations in separate p-location http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2015-04-02#t1428004903208

[gRegorLove]

I just added support for up to 10 different p-locations for an event. I think it should be ready to use, pending feedback. https://indiewebcamp.com/Template:one-day-event

[tantek]

IndieWebCamp has both a global community, and a very strong US-representation, so both US-centric Month Day, Year dates, and Europe-centric Day Month Year dates are unacceptable.

Let's stick with ISO Dates since they work the best globally, and are readable / different enough for US users for them to understand unambiguously as well.

See also:

• https://twitter.com/amazingmap/status/599931666803597312
• https://xkcd.com/1179/

[skinny97214]

I agree that if we were using numbers only the ISO format would be preferable, @tantek, but we're not burdened with that constraint. I'm not proposing a numeric date, I'm proposing spelling out the month with letters. Spelling out the month eliminates the ambiguity. The ISO standard wasn't designed with human readability as its primary concern.

Wiki of date formats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
China, which is a YYYYMMDD country uses XX Month YYYY on its visas. https://china.visahq.com/information/images/info/China-visa.jpg