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Re: proper use of labels

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 17, 2005 2:41AM

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Terrence Wood wrote:

> On 16 Jun 2005, at 10:36 PM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> > No, it isn't, since the required data format is neither natural to most
> > people nor standards-conforming. It strongly violates the international
> > standard ISO 8601, which prescribes that dd-mm-yy is to be interpreted
> > so
> > that dd denotes year, mm denotes month, and yy denotes day.
>
> The date format is perfectly natural if you are a New Zealander.

Then some people in New Zealand have failed to report the national
practices adequately. The Common Locale Data Repository entry for English
as used in New Zealand, at
http://unicode.org/cldr/data/common/main/en_NZ.xml
specifies the following date formats:
EEEE, d MMMM yyyy (full format; EEEE = day of week, MMMM = month name)
d MMMM yyyy (long format)
d/MM/yyyy (medium format; MM = month number)
d/MM/yy (short format)

No hyphen there in any of the formats. Note that notations that do not
use a hyphen in a normal date notation often use it (or a dash)
to indicate a _range_ of dates.

If you look at the variation across languages and countries, as documented
in the CLDR data base (which aims at covering _common_ practices), you
clearly see that it is impossible to design any format for date input as a
single string that would be natural to all or even most people.

That was my point in saying that date input should take place as
decomposed, i.e. day of month, month, and year separately. (Exceptions to
this include pages designed for a culturally homogenous user community.
But in accessibility, we try to cover actual heterogenousity even in
situations where the community is _assumed_ to be homogenous.)

Of course it was somewhat sidestepping in the sense that the date input
was presented just as an example. But situations where input format seems
to require an explanation, at least as a tooltip, need to be discussed
case by case - until the general point has been made, through examples,
that if it needs to be explained, it would better be decomposed into
simpler parts.

> (The
> real give away that this is an *example* is the input asks for todays
> date... now what designer/developer in their right mind would expect a
> user to input that when it is the simplest thing to work out
> programmatically? =)

Well, I thought that was too self-evident. Then again, maybe it _is_
meaningful to prompt for today's date on a page that tests a person's
cognitive or language skills. After all, one of the common checks,
when in doubt whether someone is in his senses, is to ask
"which day is it today"? :-)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/