133737 - bonsai should use iso8601-compliant dates

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Webtools Graveyard :: Bonsai, enhancement)

Description

[epu]

Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly
used variants:

easily readable and writeable by software (no 'JAN', 'FEB', ... table necessary)
easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison
language independent
can not be confused with other popular date notations
consistency with the common 24h time notation system, where the larger units
(hours) are also written in front of the smaller ones (minutes and seconds)
strings containing a date followed by a time are also easily comparable and
sortable (e.g. write "1995-02-04 22:45:00")
the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both keyboard data
entry and table layout easier identical to the Chinese date notation, so the
largest cultural group (>25%) on this planet is already familiar with it :-)
date notations with the order "year, month, day" are in addition already widely
used e.g. in Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and a few other
countries and people in the U.S. are already used to at least the "month, day"
order

ISO 8601 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Comment 1

[epu]

Attachment: patch to bonsai to conform to iso8601

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Correcting summary to indicate the true nature of this bug.

Comment 3

[timeless]

'by default' doesn't fit this patch since there's no flag for a system to use 
something else.

Comment 4

[epu]

Since there is no flag for a system to use something else,
Bonsai should use the international date/time standard.

Comment 5

[epu]

Is there any reason to not apply this patch?
Or you just delay it because you don't like it?

Other mozilla tools use the ISO date/time format. Just look at bugzilla
where ISO8601 compliance is almost done.

Comment 6

[epu]

Attachment: patch to bonsai to conform to iso date/time

Updated patch. GNOME bonsai is using these patches now.

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

reassign to patch author

Comment 8

[Constantine A. Murenin]

Is this patch still valid? Is it going to be applied anytime soon? 

Comment 9

[timeless]

Comment on attachment 105205 [details] [diff] [review]
patch to bonsai to conform to iso date/time

ok, let's speed this up.
review-.

please make a version which either accepts a per browser cookie to specify the
date format, or a server param to specify the date format. either way, there
should be a ui.

Comment 10

[Constantine A. Murenin]

(In reply to comment #9)
> (From update of attachment 105205 [details] [diff] [review])
> ok, let's speed this up.
> review-.
> 
> please make a version which either accepts a per browser cookie to specify the
> date format, or a server param to specify the date format. either way, there
> should be a ui.

I doubt that this will speed it up. Why not just use ISO8601? Could you remove
review-? 

Lets be consistent and change it in Bonsai the same way it is changed in Bugzilla. 

Comment 11

[epu]

Wow, that was fast ;-)

The first thing to do is to use the international date format as my patch does.
I don't know why bonsai shouldn't use the international standard date/time
format by default.

Comment 12

[timeless]

some people (esp me) don't like or read that format. the bug says "by default"
not "exclusively". i've repeatedly indicated what I want from a patch, namely a
param or pref.

Comment 13

[epu]

Could you tell me if bonsai is an international application that follows
international standards or is just an american application that only follows
american standards?

As Constantine A. Murenin said:
> Lets be consistent and change it in Bonsai the same way it is changed in Bugzilla.

(Most europeans can't read american dates)

You should apply the patch to be ISO8601 complaint and then wait for some user
configuration patch.

Comment 14

[timeless]

it's an american application.

Comment 15

[Constantine A. Murenin]

timeless, this bug is not about being American vs. non-American. It is about an
old-fashioned way to write dates. Most American developers I am aware of, either
prefer ISO8601 over the old-fashioned English way, or at least have no problems
with it. Please, discontinue your comments along with review- about adding a new
UI, unless you are going to write a patch. 

This bug is not about creating a UI for Date and Time. If you want to create
one, you are welcome to open a new bug and write a patch for it. I am more than
sure that not only some Americans, but some European developers as well, will
say "thank you" to you, should you provide the opportunity to modify the time
format in your UI. 

Discussing whether ISO8601 should be set by default in Bonsai is off-topic. Why
don't you raise some concerns about Bugzilla using ISO8601? 

This bug is about inconsistency in Mozilla.org development tools. Every tool
except for Bonsai already use ISO8601, therefore Bonsai should too. 

Now the last question I have --- does this patch contain all occurrences of Date
and Time in bonsai? Is it still applicable? If it is, review- should be removed
from the patch, as it resolves this bug completely, and someone needs to review
it properly and commit it. 

P.S. Correcting summary to indicate the true nature of this bug.

Comment 16

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Comment on attachment 105205 [details] [diff] [review]
patch to bonsai to conform to iso date/time

Who died and left timeless in charge of reviewing bonsai patches?

Tara, Dawn, either of you care to weigh in?

/be

Comment 17

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I tend to agree that ISO8601 is the right way to do it.  As was pointed out
earlier, everything else on mozilla.org uses it already.  And despite being
physically located in the US, Mozilla is a very international organization.

Comment 18

[timeless]

brendan: it would seem that tara and endico did. 

Comment 19

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

timeless: tara and endico died?  Sorry to hear that.

Seriously, we need to update despot if you are peer or owner.  Can you give me
the information.

In any case, you're not acting very ownerly, in my opinion, in throwing your
weight behind an inconsistency with the other webtools.  Who else besides you
wants the option to use other than 8601 format?  If you must make a personal
stand, why do it here?  Let 8601 go in, file a separate bug, fix it yourself.

eperez, would you be willing to produce a patch that lets timeless configure
things to work the way he wants?

/be

Comment 20

[timeless]

brendan: there's nothing to update:
Searching for partitions matching mozilla/webtools ...
mozilla-toplevel (matches pattern mozilla/%)
main menu

none of the webtools have partitions (just as most extensions don't and ...)

Comment 21

[epu]

Brendan Eich wrote:
> eperez, would you be willing to produce a patch that lets timeless configure
> things to work the way he wants?

I don't need that functionality in bonsai, so I don't have any plans to make a
patch.

I played some time ago with a piece of optional javascript code that made
localized dates:
<html>
<body>
before <font id="datetimeid8db095cd720ab6130b41cfbb3c11a078">2003-01-04 02:01:04
UTC</font><script language="JavaScript"><!--
dlocale = new Date(Date.UTC(2003,00,04,02,01,04));
//document.write(dlocale.toLocaleString());
document.write(dlocale.toLocaleDateString() + " " + dlocale.toLocaleTimeString());
if (document.getElementById) {  // DOM3 = IE5, NS6
 
document.getElementById('datetimeid8db095cd720ab6130b41cfbb3c11a078').style.display
= 'none';
} else { if (document.layers) {  // Netscape 4
document.datetimeid8db095cd720ab6130b41cfbb3c11a078.display = 'none';
} else {  // IE 4
document.all.datetimeid8db095cd720ab6130b41cfbb3c11a078.style.display = 'none'; }
}
//--></script> after
</body>
</html>

It works OK with IE5, Mozilla and Konqueror but IE6 doesn't like displaying
short date format so the date looks a little big.
I don't know any function to display a localized short date format under IE6,
but if any of you know this code could help.

Comment 22

[epu]

Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
> does this patch contain all occurrences of Date and Time in bonsai?
> Is it still applicable?

I'd like some of you to review it to look if I didn't miss any date/time and
look for any errors. I don't think there's any error because it's being used in
GNOME bonsai, and that's a lot of users.

If none of you are trying it with current CVS, I'll try it because I'd like to
see this patch applied.

Comment 23

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

timeless: I know, I was gonna add a partition.  How about getting this patch in
and doing a followup bug and patch for your own preference?

/be

Comment 24

[Constantine A. Murenin]

I have tried to apply the patch to the current CVS. It applies fine, with no
problems. If anyone wants me to, I can attach a patch from current CVS here. 

I think that this patch solves all problems with date and time in
mozilla/webtools/bonsai/, as I have not found any more references to date and
time in that directory. 

Comment 25

[Tara Hernandez]

I might as well have died.  I feel like I'm in hell with the current job. 

Looking at this now.

Comment 26

[Tara Hernandez]

Okay, this patch is looking good to me.  I'm not sure I understand the need for
a UI, but I agree with Brendan that regardless that is a seperate issue and
should not hold up this patch--matching standards with Bugzilla et al is of
sufficient validation IMHO.  I've got a build running with this change if
anybody cares while I continue testing and checking for missed instances.

http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bonsai-dev/toplevel.cgi?treeid=default

Comment 27

[Tara Hernandez]

Attachment: last patch missed a spot

the date format caused an error condition to get hit in cvslog.cgi.  After
thinking about it for a bit, I went ahead and removed most of the code munging
and just left the new date string in there.  

(It looks like the gnome folks just removed the blink tag on their site)

:)

Comment 28

[Christian Schmidt]

If I understand the standard correctly, named timezoned like PST is not allowed
in ISO 8601 dates. Instead ±hh:mm should be used. Unfortunately, there is no
alternative to %Z that returns this value.

Comment 29

[Constantine A. Murenin]

tara, thank you very much for fixing this bug!

justdave, thank you very much for finding tara!

VERIFIED

Comment 30

[epu]

(In reply to comment #28)
> If I understand the standard correctly, named timezones like PST is not allowed
> in ISO 8601 dates.

That's why bonsai should use UTC by default, to not discriminate people in other
timezones.

At least all the mozilla.org dates should be in UTC.

Should I open other bug to make bonsai display UTC by default?

Comment 31

[Steffen Wilberg]

This is somehow broken again. I filed bug 253287 because of that.