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144 changes: 98 additions & 46 deletions questions/qa-date-format.en.html
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -3,15 +3,15 @@
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Date formats</title>
<meta name="description" content="How do I prepare my web pages to display varying international date formats?" />
<meta name="description" content="How do I manage date formats on a web page?" />
<script>
var f = { }

// AUTHORS should fill in these assignments:
f.directory = 'questions'+'/'; // the name of the directory this file is in
f.filename = 'qa-date-format' // the file name WITHOUT extensions
f.authors = 'Lloyd Honomichl, Lionbridge' // author(s) and affiliations
f.previousauthors = '' // as above
f.authors = 'Fuqiao Xue, W3C' // author(s) and affiliations
f.previousauthors = 'Lloyd Honomichl, Lionbridge' // as above
f.modifiers = 'Richard Ishida, W3C' // people making substantive changes, and their affiliation
f.searchString = 'qa-date-format' // blog search string - usually the filename without extensions
f.firstPubDate = '2003-06-09' // date of the first publication of the document (after review)
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -40,6 +40,9 @@
<script src="../javascript/articletoc-2022.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../style/article-2022.css" />
<link rel="copyright" href="#copyright"/>

<script src="../../javascript/prism.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../style/prism.css">
</head>

<body>
Expand All @@ -56,21 +59,83 @@ <h1>Date formats</h1>


<section id="question">
<h2>Question</h2>
<p class="question">How do I prepare my web pages to display varying international date formats?</p>
<h2>How do I manage date formats on a web page?</h2>
<p>Visitors to a web site from varying locales may be confused by date formats. The format MM/DD/YY is unique to the United States (but sometimes used in Canada, too, which can obviously create some confusion there). Most of Europe uses DD/MM/YY. Japan uses YY/MM/DD. The separators may be slashes, dashes or periods. Some locales print leading zeroes, others suppress them. If a native Japanese speaker is reading a US English web page from a web site in Germany that contains the date 03/04/02 how do they interpret it?</p>
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This paragraph (which you didn't touch) is misleading. There are many formats in use. The field order problem is only part of the issue.

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The field order problem is, IMHO, the most obvious and confusing issue for web users. This paragraph also mentions the separator differences, and leading zeros, etc.

I know there are other problems that are not mentioned, such as whether to use month names, whether the year is 2 or 4 digits, whether the numbers are full-width or half-width (in CJK), which calendar to use, etc. Do these also need to be mentioned at the beginning of the article? Or should we write a separate article to talk about various date formats, just like our article on font styles and line breaking?

<p>Your first impulse may be to assume this problem will be taken care of during localization of the web pages - i.e. let the translator fix it. Resist this impulse. Do you really want to keep separate copies of documents for the U.S. and the U.K. that differ only in date format? In any case you still have to deal with multilingual users like the one in our example above.</p>
</section>

<section id="answer">
<h2>Answer</h2>
<p>Your first impulse may be to assume this problem will be taken care of during localization of the web pages - i.e. let the translator fix
it. Resist this impulse. Do you really want to keep separate copies of documents for the U.S. and the U.K. that differ only in date format? In any
case you still have to deal with multilingual users like the one in our example above.</p>
<p>You have three options to consider, all with advantages and drawbacks:</p>
<p>
There are mainly two aspects related to date processing on the Web: <a href="#input">how the user enters a date</a> and <a href="#display">how the author displays a date</a>.
</p>

<section>
<h2 id="input">User input</h2>

<p>
When it comes to accept data from the user, we usually use the <code class="kw" translate="no">input</code> element in HTML.
HTML5 introduced <code class="kw" translate="no">input</code> elements of type <code>date</code>, <code>time</code>, <code>datetime-local</code>, <code>month</code>, and <code>week</code>, which let the user easily enter a date or a time, like:
</p>

<div style="margin-inline-start: 25px;">
<p>
<label for="date">&lt;input type="<strong>date</strong>"&gt;</label>
<input type="date" id="date" name="date"
value="2021-12-07"
min="2021-12-05" max="2021-12-10">
</p>
<p>
<label for="time">&lt;input type="<strong>time</strong>"&gt;</label>
<input type="time" id="time" name="time"
min="09:00" max="18:00" required>
</p>
<p>
<label for="datetime-local">&lt;input type="<strong>datetime-local</strong>"&gt;</label>
<input type="datetime-local" id="datetime-local"
name="datetime-local" value="2021-12-07T18:00"
min="2021-12-05T00:00" max="2021-12-10T00:00">
</p>
<p>
<label for="month">&lt;input type="<strong>month</strong>"&gt;</label>
<input type="month" id="month"
name="month" value="2021-01"
min="2021-01">
</p>
<p>
<label for="week">&lt;input type="<strong>week</strong>"&gt;</label>
<input type="week" id="week"
name="week" min="2021-W01"
min="2021-W05">
</p>
</div>
<p>
Each browser has its own way of rendering these elements, and browsers that do not support them will fall back to a single-line text field.
</p>

<p>
<a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/common-microsyntaxes.html#dates-and-times">HTML</a> uses a variation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601">ISO 8601</a> standard for its date and time strings. The date and time strings do not include the time zone data. The time zone data can be stored on the server-side separately if needed.
</p>

<p>
You can set a default value for the input by using the <code>value</code> attribute or restrict the date or time using the <code>min</code> and <code>max</code> attributes.
</p>

<p>
Maybe you're using your customized date and time picker and not planning using the <code class="kw" translate="no">input</code> element, but you need to store it in a standard format to be able to share it with others.
</p>

</section>

<section>
<h2 id="display"><a href="#display">Store and display a date</a></h2>

<p>You have four options to consider, all with advantages and drawbacks:</p>

<ol>
<li>Use a locale neutral format</li>
<li>Make the month and year obvious</li>
<li>Use the Accept-Language HTTP header</li>
<li>Use JavaScript</li>
</ol>

<section id="opt1">
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -123,29 +188,30 @@ <h3>Option Three: Use the Accept-Language HTTP header</h3>
<li>Displaying a generated date in a Japanese date format such as <span lang="ja">２００３年４月２日</span> in an English page
would probably look out of place.</li>
</ul>
<p>How this is done will vary depending on your development environment. Here are some pointers for some common environments.</p>
<div class="example">
<h4>Java/JSP</h4>
<p>Call the <code>getLocale</code> method of the <code>ServletRequest</code> or <code>HttpServletRequest</code> object. Use the
returned <code>Locale</code> object to call <code>DateFormat</code>. Note that the SHORT format uses only numbers. If you want unambiguous formats
use FULL. In some locales even LONG is all numeric. <!--(<a href="http://www.honomichl.com/java.html">Sample code</a>)--></p>
<p>See also <a class="print" href="http://icu-project.org/">ICU4J</a> since it contains more up-to-date data (and more functionality) than the JDK routines.</p>
</div>
<div class="example">
<h4>ASP</h4>
<p>Use <code>Request.ServerVariables('HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE')</code> to get the user's preferences. Parse the first locale from the list
of accepted locales. You'll have to do your own mapping from the alphabetic locale code to a numeric Locale Identifier. Set <code>Session.LCID</code> to the resulting value. Call <code>FormatDateTime</code> to format the date.</p>
<p>Use vbLongDate to avoid ambiguity.</p>
</div>
<div class="example">
<h4>Perl</h4>
<p>Use <code>$ENV{'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'}</code> to get the preferred language. Use <code>POSIX:strftime</code> to format date values.
You'll have to do your own mapping of the accepted languages value to a date format string.</p>
</div>
<p>How this is done will vary depending on your development environment.</p>
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The section "Store and display a date" also seems to lack focus. In fact, i think it's trying to do 2 separate things:

  1. describe how local date/time formats can be different and problematic, and what works or doesn't work if you try to use a generic format
  2. describe how to produce dates and times in your code (one method described is that using JavaScript – but it doesn't mention the time element in HTML

Is option 3 really something useful these days? Or is it part of the discussion "How language interacts with date/time settings and where to get the language from" ?

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Do you have any specific suggestions? I think option 3 is still useful. Do you think it should be removed or split into a separate article?

</section>

<section>
<h3 id="opt4"><a href="#opt4">Option Four: Use JavaScript</a></h3>
<p>
The JavaScript <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date"><code>Date</code></a> object represent a single moment in time in a platform-independent format. When creating a <code>Date</code> object, the input should conform to the <a href="https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-date-time-string-format">ISO 8601 format</a> (<code>YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ</code>). The parsing behaviour with other formats is implementation-defined and may be different in different browsers.
</p>
<p>
There are several methods in <code>Date</code> to return a string representation of a particular current date and time in various formats and perform time zone conversions. For example, the <code>toLocaleString</code> method returns a string with a language sensitive representation of this date:
</p>
<figure>
<pre><code class="language-javascript">const event = new Date('2022-08-21T08:53:00')

console.log(event.toLocaleString('zh-Hans-SG'))
// expected output: 2022年8月21日 上午8:53:00
</code></pre>
</figure>
<p>
You can also refer to the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date">Date</a> page on MDN for more information.
</p>
</section>

<section id="summary">
<h3>Summary</h3>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>No ideal solution exists for this problem. Weigh the options and choose according to your preferences and your situation.</p>
<p>If there is likely to be any ambiguity on the part of the user, it is usually best to use explicit month names and 4-digit years for
Gregorian dates, or at least indicate on the page how to read the dates.</p>
Expand All @@ -166,21 +232,7 @@ <h2>Further reading</h2>

<ul id="full-links">
<li>
<p><a href="http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3/techdocs/api/javax/servlet/ServletRequest.html">ServletRequest API description, including
getLocale method</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/text/DateFormat.html">Use of the Java DateFormat class</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/vsfctformatdatetime.asp">About VBScript
FormatDateTime function</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getWR/steps/wrg_date.mspx#web">Date formatting in the .NET Framework</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://www.honomichl.com/java.html">Java/JSP sample code</a></p>
<p><a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#the-input-element">The <code class="kw" translate="no">input</code> element in the HTML Standard</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
</section>
Expand Down