>Get yourself a decent mailer program that handles it!

I believe that will be standard in all mail readers soon.
Ought to be anyway...  

Until that we shuld add the http:// to URLs in mails that is read by so many people as in this list.
It is much easier for one person to add that than some hundered having to do so.  
Even if our own systems recognise the www.xxx.yyy !


>Which reminds me of another "pet hate" of mine. 'Date' formats on the
>web.
>Today 21/10/99, 10/21/99, why not 21-Oct-99?
>
>I love the US format, as I use it to name and sort files in date order,
>example: Robertson1021.txt
>
>If today was the 09/10/99, then it could be 10/09/99 easily. Depends on
>which part of the world you come from, so how can you be sure which date
>a person is really talking about when it comes to our global village?
>
>Don McKenzie

I read a note some ten years ago that an international standardisation organization (IEC?) defined a world standard for time and date, in the very natural order most significant first:

   YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss,ss...

Example
   1999-10-21 18:23:42,16

i.e 4 year digits, then month, then date, with "-" between, then a space, then hours (0-23), minutes and seconds with ":" between (I am not sure about this detail please correct me if I am wrong), then decimal commaafter the seconds, and then go the deciamls of second (i think two digits as standard) The decial secinds are optional, and so I think is seconds.

Having it all numerical and in the weighted order makes it easy to sort, and the "-" and ":" makes this look different from other numbering.  I think that is briht.

Here in sweden we often use this standard, and often the short date format

         YYMMDD

Problem is as Don told that it may be confused with both the 

         MMDDYY
and 
         DDMMYY

standards, making some last use date marking on food pretty dangerous...  how to decode "021107" on a conserve?!

Maybe if it is expressed with "-", i.e YY-MM-DD it will tell it is this order?
Just a thought.  Just don't tell me 4 year digits is needed on food...


I understand the orders MMDDYY and DDMMYY is from the order in which they are pronounced in some languages text or speak, but as so they will vary from language to language, and some languages may use more than one "gramatically" correct order this make a problem.  But we can«t have a date order for every language! 

As in all other numerical data place the numbers in weighted order, why should we mess up the date expression?!

  And for example we write the time 5:20 even if in english we still express it "twenty past five".

I say: keep to the defined world standard (and logical order)!

/Morgan




Morgans Reglerteknik, HŠllekŒs, 277 35 KIVIK, SWEDEN
   tel +46(0)414-446620, fax -70331,   mrt@iname.com