[Zope3-dev] Re: SVN: Zope3/branches/3.3/ Fixed issue 525: DateWidget ru-format

[Christian Theune]

Dmitry Vasiliev wrote:
> Gary Poster wrote:
> 
>> However, I'm not sure the new widget behavior is great for non-default 
>> locales either.  Certainly being able to display dates in a 
>> locale-specific way is nice, but the input seems to be problematic.  
>> If you specify an ACCEPT-LANGUAGE of "en-US", for instance, you need 
>> to fill in "Dec 2, 2002 12:30:00 PM", if I remember correctly.  Fully 
>> spelling out "December" does not work.  Leaving off the seconds 
>> doesn't work.  Any other format will not work.  I didn't check, but 
>> assume other languages result in similar restrictions in input.
> 
> Yes, the input is a bit problematic in russian too, especially for 
> "long" and "full" display styles. Unfortunately I didn't get any reply 
> on my pre-checkin message 
> (http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2006-June/019585.html) so I 
> guessed no one was interested in the problem.
> 
>> The data in en.xml could be usable to get a more robust approach, and 
>> it could even be done without change to zope.i18n for dates.  But 
>> AFAICT, for datetimes some help would need to be implemented in the 
>> i18n.locale module (since the order of dates and times is specified in 
>> the XML); and for datetimes and times I think we'd want to make 
>> specifying seconds, and maybe even minutes, optional.  This is 
>> probably doable, but it seems like it might be painful to code and test.
> 
> I agree the i18n datetime parsing should be made a bit relaxed. I even 
> think the only important thing in this context is the order of the 
> fields, so we can ignore spaces (or even ignore some other delimitters?) 
> and maybe ignore other non-field characters (for example in the russian 
> "long" format you always need to write year as "year 2006" instead of 
> the simple "2006").

I'm very much against "relaxed" date/time format checking. I tend to 
give my user the exact format that is expected and fail otherwise. All 
the guessing in the past led to bad bad errors because the field order 
the user entered was syntactically compatible but had a semantically 
different meaning.

E.g.

02/05/2005 and 02.05.2005 are two different things.

Christian

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