At 3:29 PM -0500 1997-13-09, Simon Pockley wrote:
>...I have
>been moving quite a lot of information off the display side of the screen into
>the metadata in the belief that humans will be reading it as well as
>machines.
>
>Do you think this is wrong thinking ?
>
>Following the discussion about dates (earlier in the year), I have been
>sticking to my belief that a date is unambiguously human readable in the form
>14th September 1997 rather than 19970914 which I don't think is a human
>friendly form.
I too read the metadata on people's pages occasionally, but I think most
people don't (who wants to download hundreds of HTML sources?). In fact, I
think many don't even *know* about it. What I think browsers should offer
is an info window, which automatically renders widely recognized meta-data
so that a user can always have an information window open that shows this
data, much in the same way e-mail programs can hide or show headers on an
e-mail message. However, until browsers do this I think most information
you think is relevant to the user, such as date created, date modified,
etc., should be displayed on the page itself--perhaps even in a custom
formatted form (ie, 1997-06-03 renders as "June 3, 1997", or whatever the
user designates as standard date display). It's generally not that big a
deal to add, and doesn't noticeably increase download times or anything of
that nature. I always say, "If it don't hurt it, add it!" Better more
information than less.
As far as readable date format--it was my understanding that the format of
YYYY-MM-DD was the *suggested* format, and that you could use one of your
own. However, for compatibility purposes I think you may want to use the
standard format for the metadata, then use the more readable format on the
page itself. I have always liked 13-Sep-1997, which is very clear an
unambiguous--assuming, of course, that you understand English. But
presumeably the whole document would be in English anyway.
--------------------------------------------------------
[ Jordan Reiter ]
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[ "Don't you realize that intellectual people ]
[ are all ignorant because they can't spray ]
[ paint that small?" ]
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