From: Tony Jollans (Tony@Jollans.com)
Date: Wed Dec 07 2005 - 13:33:50 CST
I'm new here, so forgive me if I get this wrong :)
The proposition is that the short date format include the century. Much of
the comment seems to have been about the now historical Y2K issue and what
it did or did not achieve, which doesn't really seem helpful.
My understanding is that the Short Date format is part of the man-machine
interface; it is (a) a format for displaying dates and (b) should act as a
disambiguator in interpreting human-entered dates; it is not (or should not
be) an internal format. If this is correct then adding the century is
(theoretically) prescriptive and would do two things:
1. Impose a century on short date output
2. Effectively disallow entry of 2-digit years less than 32 to conformant
applications
The first of these doesn't really raise concern; the second seems to impose
a needless, and not very effective, restriction which would not, and could
not, take the place of date range validation which is, by definition,
application-specific.
It may, in part, reflect an element of good practice but if that is the, in
my opinion misguided, intention it should not be limited to just the US
locale.
Enjoy,
Tony
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