[thelist] Date formatting woes ...

[Rob Smith]

Hi,

I've built this cool web app for my company that keeps track of all the
things we do around here and while it works beautifully, there has been some
concern raised with date formatting. The server is here the US of A, but at
the same time, we have employees all over the world using it. 

The server timestamps stuff with the MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS format because it's
configured for America's time format. We have our guys and gals in Europe
who're doing 21 September 2004 and the guys and gals in the US doing
9/21/04.

One of the things I was pondering was that I detect the user's location and
flip a toggle switch to where ever there is a date coming out of the server,
it flips it over the to the Europe standard. Visa Versa for the US folks.

My brain is a little fried this morning, can you offer some strategies in
your multi-national experience and finding a norm that's not confusing? 

One of the known pieces of this puzzle is that this is a US based company.
The tendency is to lean towards sticking with the US time standards and let
the folks out in the EU enter dates in the US format for this project only.

I'm writing a users manual for this web app and we have to write something
down, 

Rob Smith