oasis-library-review — archive

[Gregory Rundlett]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 12:04:15 pm Scott McGrath wrote: > In nearly all cases of file naming, url, uri and similar discussions, > you'll not hear anything of value from me. > > But in this case, I'd point out that when using dates in a file name there > is an easy way have them sort in chronological order FileNameYYYYMMDD. > Maybe this is only an issue on your desktop, but figuring out this little > detail sure made my life easier. Bravo, I'm glad to see Scott leading good practice by his example. That is such a good idea that ISO standardized it [1], and I have incorporated it into our guidelines for OASIS (staff) in creating filenames with dates [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 [2] http://ts.oasis-open.org/wiki/index.php/Oasis_Web_Page_Guidelines It also helps disambiguate the regional difference between Europe and America where Europeans use the day first, and month second whereas Americans use the month first and day second (in short-hand format). For example: 10/31 is obviously (sarcasm) haloween, my birthday and the 31st day of October and lacking any year specificity. (Europeans would write 31/10 ) 04/01 is not obviously any particular date (Is it April 2001? The 4th day of January? The first day of April?) 2008-04-01 is precise What Bob should have done is be more precise in his date (he used a two-digit year), and be more precise in his template to indicate placeholders (YYYY-MM-DD) > > >