While looking at our preferences, I noticed we have a fairly generic but
unfriendly timezone selector, done as a drop-down box with a raw list of
zone names -- this makes you find and select something like
"America/Los_Angeles" or "Asia/Tokyo".
Not only is the list very long and confusingly sorted, but the names are
all either English or acronyms, making it hard to internationalize.
It occurs to me that we very rarely actually output formatted dates in
the web interface anyway... most of the time we output relative times
like "a few seconds ago" or "3 months ago".
In fact, about the only place I can see that we're outputting a fully
formatted date is on an individual notice like this:
http://identi.ca/notice/15645070
"Brion Vibber (brionv) 's status on Friday, 27-Nov-09 19:19:11 UTC"
"Brion Vibber (brionv) 's status on Friday, 27-Nov-09 11:19:11 PST"
etc
though we also have tooltips on the approximation eg "about a month
ago": "2009-11-27T11:19:11-08:00"
My own inclination would be to drop the timezone preferences entirely;
in the rare cases where we output a formatted local date we can let
client-side JavaScript do the actual date formatting with the client
system's actual time zone and language settings, with a UTC/GMT fallback
for clients with JS disabled.
This drops an unnecessary and hard-to-select option field from
preferences and site administration panels, and avoids inconsistencies
when you travel or move and forget to update the timezone.
Any objections or suggestions for further refinement?
-- brion vibber (brion @ status.net)
_______________________________________________
StatusNet-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
