07/07/07 in all date formats

The title is a parody of Bruno Boaventura’s wedding announcement. Each culture has its own date format, which impairs international communication, and sometimes even local communication.

In Ribeirão Preto (Brazil), for example, the English American date format is used by part of the machines in a clinical biochemistry laboratory which is part of the public health system. While Brazilians use the dd/mm/yyyy format, this machine(s) prints mm/dd/yy. If a result has the “05/04/06” date, when was the exam collected?

ISO 8601 (international date format) was created to avoid this ambiguity, and the W3C supports the initiative.

My blog’s theme fails on this part, and I’m already in touch with the author so that he will internationalize the next version. Some day I’ll have to adequate my blog to FOSS-unaware readers, and maybe then I’ll edit the theme myself to fix the date format. If you know any PHP, your help is welcome!

Updated The theme issue should be fixed now (November 4, 2007). I internationalized the theme, i. e., made it translatable. Each locale (with a translation) should see dates in the local format.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 17:23 and is filed under Software livre, Tradução. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “07/07/07 in all date formats”

  1. Software for developers: translated or in English? | Leonardo Fontenelle Says:
    December 22nd, 2007 pm31 15:10

    [...] from translation. Many readers said they preferred user interfaces in English, but virtually all wanted dates and numbers in the local format. A Russion company couldn’t use the version control software because it wasn’t [...]

  2. John Drinkwater Says:
    January 2nd, 2008 pm31 18:19

    I think you’re confusing American and English, as we use the sensible dd/mm/yyyy here in England (and the rest of Britain). Probably best not to refer to their scheme as English.

  3. Leonardo Fontenelle Says:
    January 2nd, 2008 pm31 22:24

    John, fixed it. Thanks!

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