Forum Moderators: phranque
A date of 1/2/01 appeared in a thread ... Well, in a mm/dd/yy country that is January 2nd but in a dd/mm/yy country that is 1st February... just a little different (fortunately it was not a trans-atlantic wedding invitation).
It may surprise you to know that a significant number of people are not even aware of these differences.
I'm not carping or looking for arguments on the relative merits of either format... just quietly reminding you good people to be unambiguous when using dates, especially if the date has some particular significance.... eg 5th March 01 leaves no room for doubt.
Living in a dd/mm/yy country and working for a mm/dd/yy American company, I can assure you I have witnessed some real doozies arise through this.
I'm a mm/dd/yy guy, but yyyy/mm/dd keeps things (particularly filenames using dates) in a nice orderly fashion in an ascii sort.-you'll even be ready for Y3K. I agree that this is confusing, my server dates files yy/mm/dd and I have to stop and be sure I'm deciphering the date code properly.
Living in Oz, I also get confused sometimes with m/d/y dates. Makes life fun they say...
Onay
Woz
As austtr says it is important to think globaly on the internet even if you targeting local markets as you really have little (if any) control over which country your visitor is in. So it is important to not only put internation versions of tou telephone number on your site, but also format them correctly.
I was doing some work for a Sydney publishing company, who proudly placed their phone number on the web as (612) **** **** . The problem is the first three numbers. 61 is the country code for Australia, 2 is the area code for the state of New South Wales. They thought they were correct in formatting it this way, but I am sure our Northern American friends are already seeing the mistake. (612) is an actual area code in USA, although I forget where, so I am sure a number of people in the US were getting very strange phone call from people looking for an Australia publishing compnay. Unfortunately when I pointed this out to them they didn't see any problem (horses to water and all that).
As I understand from my expreince the correct format is +CC (0)AC **** **** being
+ = dial whatever is appropriate in your country for international access
CC = country code
(0) = any area code numbers needed IN COUNTRY but superfluous OUT OF COUNTRY
AC = area code
**** **** = individual phone number.
So, my number is Australia is +61 (0)2 **** **** (Ha, you though I was going to give my number didn't you)
Some countries however do go against this format;
Singapore uses (65) *** **** which should be +65 *** ****
Hong Kong uses (852) **** **** which should be +852 **** **** (although this is probably in preperation for 852 becoming a China area code)
and just to confuse matter more, Malaysia uses (61)3 *** **** (61 = Malaysia 3 = Kuala Lumpur)
and so on.
This is as I believe it should be, but I am open to other suggestions. Whatever is used it would be good to standardise yes?
Onya
Woz
I would prefer dd/mm/yy and the metric system and the banning of fractions.
1/16 of an inch divided by 1/32 of an inch . . . ahh, my poor kids!
< (612) is an actual area code in USA, although I forget where
(612) is for Minneapolis Minnesota, USA.
minnapple
