[IxDA Discuss] Small usability issue - forms

[Peter Bagnall]

On 29 Jun 2006, at 21:14, Katie Albers wrote:
> This may not be an issue for any particular audience, but if you're
> talking about an international audience you immediately run smack
> into the month/day--day/month issue. This can be handled a number of
> ways, but simply entering the string of numbers isn't one of them,
> unless the interface then displays the date in a format that includes
> the month in a text format, allowing the user to make changes if the
> date's been translated wrong. There are many ways to handle this at
> different levels of the overall interaction (for example, the user
> may enter the country first and the date order then orients to their
> preferred order or you can have 3 fields, each of which is labelled
> and echoes the data input in the form that the computer will
> interpret it).

In theory you should alternatively be able to use the systems  
language settings to determine which format is likely to be the  
locally accepted one.

If it's application software then the OS provides localization  
information, which can (and should) be used. I would expect this to  
be more reliable, in fact I'd expect it to be correct in almost all  
cases.

Browsers send the server a list of languages they will accept, and  
you could use that. For example if it is en-US then you use m/d/y but  
if it's en-GB you use d/m/y. This of course assumes that the browser  
is correctly configured. It ought to get it's initial config from the  
OS, but I'm not certain whether all do or not. One problem I think  
may arise is that some non US english systems may default to en-US.  
Of course, it would be really nice if the browser told the server its  
preferred date format, but of course, it doesn't! The last issue of  
course is you need to have a list of language to date format mappings  
which is technically easy, but I don't off hand know where you'd find  
such a list.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has actually done this sort of  
thing on the web though, and if so whether they found it reliable or  
not.

Of course, it's never actually that simple. I just discovered that  
I'm living in the 26th century... at least by the Buddhist calendar!

Cheers
--Pete

----------------------------------------------------------
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is
not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
		Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 - 1519

Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/