4 ms·
Bizarre. The author seems to be implying that only one definition of the first day of a week can be tolerated (and that his is implicitly the correct one), and
by Jedd 11y ago
Bizarre. The author seems to be implying that only one definition of the first day of a week can be tolerated (and that his is implicitly the correct one), and later in the comments field that it's intolerable that the 1st of January could ever not be in the first week of a given year.
ISO8601 [1] is pretty clear on how you determine the first week (as noted on the wikipedia page, these are functionally equivalent) :
o the week with the year's first Thursday in it (the formal ISO definition),
o the week with 4 January in it,
o the first week with the majority (four or more) of its days in the starting year, and
o the week starting with the Monday in the period 29 December – 4 January.
While it's doubtless fun to scream into the wind (of International Standards), and perhaps we may churlishly expect MS to instinctively resist anything labelled as a standard, comments like this:
> The customer wants to know if there is anything we can do so we
> get the correct result.
are somewhat distressing.
The customer already has the correct result, just neither party understands what the correct result should be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- Arnavion 11y agoI assume you're new to his blog. For regular readers it is clear it's humor / sarcasm. Edit: And I'm not sure how ISO8601's definition of the first week is relevant to a discussion of dates in a particular culture (Danish).
- Jedd 11y agoFirst time I've read any of his writing. Initial thought was it must be an attempt at humour, but bits of it read as a genuine gripe (perhaps veiled in humour). Poe's Law applies heavily in these situations (intersection of Microsoft, US world views, international standards, Europe). ISO8601's definition of the first week is particularly relevant, as many of his comments relate to when a week starts (he believes it starts on a Sunday), and when the first week of the year starts (AFAICT he seems to think it's whatever week has the 1st of January in it). The 'dates in a particular culture' is the entirety of what this article is about. The 'Danish culture' doesn't treat dates peculiarly - they align with ISO8601 by the looks of it. It seems to be more of a discussion of dates in the US culture.
- Joeri 11y agoI work on software that's used globally. We've found that ISO week conventions (starts on Monday, day-month-year, week numbering as described in the article) are good enough for everyone except the US. We have just two settings for our date system: ISO and US. I think the US has a peculiar attitude towards standards. You also see it with miles vs kilometers, Fahrenheit vs Celsius, and a bunch of more obscure standards particular to our industry. It takes more effort to make our software ready for the US than for the rest of the world combined. (Although admittedly we don't support right-to-left.)