[Wikipedia-l] Re: Date Formats

[Rowan Collins]

On 30/04/05, James R. Johnson <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I was wondering more along the lines of a tag, like the geo, so that we can
> format the date within the article, such as [[date:10-24-2005;us;md]] or
> [[date:24-10-2005;iso;dm]] to tell the computer to display in the first case
> the date October 24th, 2005 in the US format, with only the month and day,
> thus "October 24" and in the second case in the ISO format, with only the
> day and month, so "24 October" with the month names coming from the System
> messages.

I don't understand - why would you want to force a particular format
in this way, and if you did, what would be wrong with just writing it
out yourself? Surely the aim is to have dates, however entered, appear
uniformly in the format chosen by the user *reading* the page. This is
exactly what Tim's DateFormatter does, but rather than having to
specifically tag it as a date, you just have to make the parts of the
date into links. (Of course, this has disadvantages - such as a lot of
fairly irrelevant links into pages to do with dates - but it makes it
very easy to use)

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]