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Lessons for uncultured web developers

troyhunt.com

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Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#41

Post by HumanamuH »

fredley wrote: post #6
Tichy wrote: post #2

Why is nobody using the ISO format for dates? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 yyyy-mm-dd? Another benefit is that it sorts correctly in the file explorers (I used to name my photo folders like that...). Coming from a country where we typically do dd/mm I can never remember what the English standard is. I've taken to always writing the name of the month to be sure. Also, can the huge lead of the iPhone still be…

Because it's a format rarely used outside of an engineering context. If your users are 100% from a technical background, and always will be, fine. Otherwise, a lot of your users will find it difficult to parse dates in this format.

According to the map of date formats in the article, there are a lot of people worldwide who use this format outside of an engineering context.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#42

Post by icebraining »

klodolph wrote: post #39

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these). History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the…

.arpa didn't disappear, it changed its purpose.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#43

Post by sp8 »

> 6. Country code top level domains give context

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I'm a self-proclaimed domain name pedant and this gradual decline into mainstream abuse of ccTLDs drives me mad on a daily basis.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#44

Post by soren_dahl »

klodolph wrote: post #39

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these). History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the…

True, though .uk is more correct (Great Britain doesn't include Northern Ireland) and is reserved by the United Kingdom in ISO 3166

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#45

Post by quesera »

klodolph wrote: post #39

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these). History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the…

My favorite TLD was .oz for Australia. Sadly, that one was deleted in the name of "consistency", and we all had to get used to it.

The net was once a fun place managed by smart people, consensus, and working code. Now, a million times larger, all we can hope for is neutrality or ineffectiveness.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#47

Post by incision »

Tichy wrote: post #2

Why is nobody using the ISO format for dates? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 yyyy-mm-dd? Another benefit is that it sorts correctly in the file explorers (I used to name my photo folders like that...). Coming from a country where we typically do dd/mm I can never remember what the English standard is. I've taken to always writing the name of the month to be sure. Also, can the huge lead of the iPhone still be…

I've been using this format everywhere I can for years now. Quite often, when first exposed to it, folks go directly from "Huh?" to "Oh wow, that makes a lot of sense."

One person at a time.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#48

Post by toyg »

soren_dahl wrote: post #44
klodolph wrote: post #39

> Why are these US only? It’s a conundrum which we probably don’t regularly need to worry about, but it’s unusual all the same (I’d love to hear insight on why there’s no .us on these). History of the internet: it was invented as a US department of defense research project, and grew into the beast it is today. You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US. Note that .uk exists for the…

True, though .uk is more correct (Great Britain doesn't include Northern Ireland) and is reserved by the United Kingdom in ISO 3166

I'd agree if it weren't for the confusion it generates, as ISO country codes GB/GBR counter-intuitively don't map to a TLD.

Also, Ukraine got shafted into another mismatch (UA is TLD and ISO alpha-2, UKR is alpha-3), although in their case one could say the country wasn't around when ISO codes were formulated. Some Linux distributions used to have a UK keymap which was... ukrainian. That was a lot of fun to fix (not).

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#49

Post by toyg »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #29

Another lesson that might be useful is not to assume that the week starts on a particular day. I live in the UK and the general convention here is the the week on Monday. In find calendars (presumably designed in the US) that start on Sunday particularly frustrating and error-prone. Not being able to customise this is uncultured. Different cultures have different conventions, and if a seven-day week is the norm then…

Why limit to Sat-Mon? If one has to offer such a feature, might as well go all the way and make it an arbitrary day. One standard plus one variation can be special-cased, but with two variations you might as well code things properly.

Re: Lessons for uncultured web developers

#50

Post by bonobo »

losvedir wrote: post #17
k-mcgrady wrote: post #7

Good list, and interesting how at least half of the points are about localisation/internationalization. The date point was good I find that one very annoying. The easiest way to work it out on forums is usually to look at the previous post and see what number goes down (day). I didn't realise the mm/dd format was only officially used in two countries. I've never understood why it's use at all, it makes much more sens…

> Is there a reason mm/dd was chosen in the US I don't know which came first, but it agrees with the way we say it out loud. "Today is September tenth." So, maybe that's why? And I think in other countries, it's said the other way around, right? "Today is the tenth of September?" That would actually be okay sounding in the U.S., too, though a little uncommon. Can you say "Today is tenth September"? That sounds very w…

> And I think in other countries, it's said the other way around, right? "Today is the tenth of September?" That would actually be okay sounding in the U.S., too, though a little uncommon. Can you say "Today is tenth September"? That sounds very weird to me.

You mean in english? Because in portuguese we use cardinals to refer to days, and not ordinals. "Dez de setembro de 2012"—literally: "Ten of September of 2012." I'd guess it's the same in spanish.

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