New Message: Longstanding date format problem in news items

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$539

By: Paul Howson (phowson at flexi.net.au)

Given that Manila 9.1 is on the way, would it be at all possible for the longstanding problem with date formats in news postings to be addressed? This has been discussed here some time ago (with Lawrence Lee I recall).

Basically, Manila supports the USA mm/dd/yy format ONLY for the \{postTime} pseudo-macro. Because these news item macros are not real macros, just special strings which are substituted, it is not possible to override this behavior. Outside of the USA (e.g. Australia) the standard date format is dd/mm/yy. This can cause awful confusion and ambiguity -- the month and the day are interpreted the wrong way around!

Please consider whether a solution to this problem could be included soon.

Thanks.

Paul Howson.