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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I can see how customizable locale/formatting would be important, but would it really matter if a US visitor to the Norwegian website saw a mm/dd/yyyy date instead of the yyyy-mm-dd that would be shown to those with norwegian locale? The important thing seems to be that the user understands the format. This is client side rendering after all.

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It is important that a Norwegian visitor with a browser configured to prefer en-US [1] would see the entire web page in the same locale. Why should _parts_ of the web page localize to a different locale than other parts?

The standard Norwegian date format is DD.MM.YYYY, _easily_ confused with MM/DD/YYYY. Why is it a feature to include this confusion?

[1]: This is pretty common, either deliberately or by accident. If you actually want to serve content localized in multiple ways (eg. you want to serve both an English and a Norwegian version) you have to sidestep browser localization anyway and offer the user a way to select which version they want.

> It is important that a Norwegian visitor with a browser configured to prefer en-US [1] would see the entire web page in the same locale. Why should _parts_ of the web page localize to a different locale than other parts?

Completely agree - that should not happen. Consistency is most important. So if a Norwegian user has an en-US browser and the rendering uses this control which uses default browser locale then all date rendering in all markup has to be en-US. That is: this control can't be used on a web site unless the site already uses browser locale for all date input and output.

If the web page already has custom date formatting (e.g. the user chooses locale/format in the site preferences) or if the page has elements rendererd DD.MM.YYYY already from the back end - then this control can't be used.

(Also: TIL Norway doesn't use ISO 8601 like Sweden. I honestly thought ISO 8601 was norm in Europe, but apparently mostly in Sweden).

According to [1] Sweden uses SS-ISO 8601 and Norway uses NS-ISO 8601.

According to [2]: "All members of CEN[3] (all of Western Europe and Scandinavia, and most of Eastern Europe) are required to adopt the EN 28601 European Standard. Most have now done so"

It's not obvious what this really means though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Related_standards [2] http://www.qsl.net/g1smd/isoimp.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Committee_for_Standar...

I think [1] only covers how ISO is used in norway. I think if you look at what's actually common you'll find that norwegians use the non-ISO dd.MM.yy most of the time, but when they use ISO they use ISO as in [1] above.

That's the difference to sweden, we'd actually us an ISO 8601 type format as our everyday format.

You're confusing language and locale and that's going to be equally confusing to your users.

I read web content in several languages and expect date formats in ALL applications my application to follow my OS locale which is Finnish.

My Windows operating system is in English, yet my locale is Finnish, so that the date format is Finnish. This is the standard way of using locales. Why would web sites be any different?

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