On Tuesday, November 9, 2004 at 17:24 (which was Tuesday, November 9, 2004 at 16:24 where I am) Avi Yashar wrote:
> I do *not* think that Ritlabs should follow the ISO standard on this > point. I personally think that the ISO standard here is entirely > philistine and likely to offend the sensibilities of many - both > religious and non-religious. Regardless of which day you list first, there might be at least one person who will be offended. On my Palm organizer, I use an alternat calendar application called DateBk5 (found on <http://www.pimlicosoftware.com> in case someone is interested) that, unlike the default built-in calendar, has the ability to specify any weekday as the first day of the week. Interface and programmingwise I think we would be adding unnecessary complexity to the preferences sheet in question if Ritlabs would have to shift the weekdays depending on the cultural or religious background of the user, but others may differ. I think that at least two wishes are in order: 1) to have an option specifying the first day of the week and 2) that only abbreviations be used to reference the days of the week and not numbers. I have the feeling that much more than the order of presentation, the fact that they are so explicitly numbered now is part of the reason why this thread is getting so many messages. On another note, I find it funny that while several people are using religious arguments why Ritlabs should not enforce the use of ISO calendar standards upon us, I have so far not seen any requests to have TB! support other calendar systems such as the Jewish or Muslim calendars that obviously differ from the generally used Gregorian one. In case Ritlabs is interested, there is a great book called 'Calendrical calculations' that shows conversion methods between some 30 calendars including the aforementioned Jewish, Muslim and Gregorian calendars and includes also Bahai, Maya, Koptic, Julian etc. The related website is <http://www.calendarists.com/>. As a matter of history, months and weeks (ordering days in groups of around 29 and exactly 7 days) pre-date muslim, christian and jewish beliefs alike. In most germanic languages and even in English (anglo-saxon), the names of the days are derived from nature and scandinavian gods. Other languages may have the same, but I'm not familiar enough with them to comment. One thing though: although in recent history Russia has been under communist atheist rule for quite some time, I don't believe the communists ever touched their word for Sunday: Voskresenie (my Russian-English transcription may be off, I'm Dutch) which literally means: resurrection day, refering to the day that Christ resurrected from the grave. -- Greetings, Maurice Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 The Bat! v3.0.2.6; ; Bayes Filter Plugin v1.5.6; AJS v0.6; MyMacros 1.11a; ________________________________________________________ Current beta is 3.0.2.6 Rush | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html IMPORTANT: To register as a Beta tester, use this link first - http://www.ritlabs.com/en/partners/testers/
