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A note from the front line. I actually use 8601 dates in a date-heavy consumer product ( https://clubman.app https://clubman.app ) and it’s hands down the featu
by davidbanham 6y ago
A note from the front line. I actually use 8601 dates in a date-heavy consumer product ( https://clubman.app https://clubman.app ) and it’s hands down the feature I most consistently get user feedback on.
It’s always “Why are the dates all American format? Can you change them to English?” And then I try to patiently explain that they’re actually international format.
People seem to have internalised that any date format they find slightly unfamiliar is “the bad American one”
I’m in the process of cutting everything I can over to “24th Jan 2020” style.
- jamie_ca 6y agoAnother advantage to outputting 8601 dates is it's easy to mechanically parse - you can probably find some JS to rewrite the 8601 dates coming from the server into whatever the user's current locale is. Bonus points: if your timestamps are UTC, the frontend reformatting can even take timezones into account (such that an American and an Australian could correctly see different dates for the same timestamp).
- davidbanham 6y agoI did try rewriting dates into a user's locale as specified by the browser. The trouble there is that a lot of people seem to have that set to en-US rather than en-AU. So I still got a bunch of people unhappy that the dates were American!