303647 - Feedview: Localize the date/time format

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[Grey Nicholson (they/them)]

At the moment Feedview formats date/times like so: "Thu, 04 Aug @ 21:49". I have
several problems with this: the "@" is excessively trendy and otherwise useless;
the day and month are needlessly abbrev.; the comma is quite extraneous and (bug
303444:) the year is absent.

Being an international standards-, unambiguity- and number-junkie, I'd like
"2005-08-04 21:49" (given that the local timezone is used anyway).

But for general consumption I suggest "Thursday 04 August 2005 at 21:49", or if
it's restricted to text that can be copied raw from an RSS 2.0 feed, "Thu 04 Aug
2005, 21:49". (I assume this isn't the case though, as copying dates wholesale
from various formats would be Netscape 8ishly inconsistent UI.)

(Actually, I'll be happy as long as the "@" dies.)

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

On windows you can probably use the system date/time format.
(Settings - Control Panel - Regional Options - Time and Date tabs)

Comment 2

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Simple patch using Date toLocaleString

This patch uses Date toLocaleString(). The down side to this is that that
format is a bit verbose. I'm guessing Mozilla has som XPCOM component to handle
localization of dates in more detail.

Comment 3

[Erik Arvidsson]

Attachment: Remove some useless code

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Patch using ScriptableDateTimeFormat

(In reply to comment #2)
> Created an attachment (id=191881) [edit]
> Simple patch using Date toLocaleString
> 
> This patch uses Date toLocaleString(). The down side to this is that that
> format is a bit verbose. I'm guessing Mozilla has som XPCOM component to
handle
> localization of dates in more detail.

See this patch. ScriptableDateTimeFormatter does what we want, however, we
can't create it from the place where it's called. It needs to be created from
chrome, and apparently the code it's in in the above patch doesn't get run from
chrome (see bug 303332)

So, we have three options (if we want to use this interface):

* Make the scriptableDateTimeFormatter available outside chrome
* Create a scriptableDateTimeFormatter from a chrome part of the code, and use
it from here (would that work??)
* Wait until this code moves into chrome.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Patch -w

Oops. Damn DOS/Unix line ends. Patch without whitespace this time.

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Since Son Of Feedview doesn't even display dates (yet), we can probably start over with a new bug if it also winds up with unlocalized dates.

Comment 7

[Tanner M. Young [:tmyoung]]

Resetting QA Contact to default.