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Comment by Ciantic | Hacker News Reader

I wish the calendar widget would be improved in standard Chrome too. Looks like though they are not making the slashes optional, it's not usable for Europeans as we tend to use dots.

Part of the problem is that it assumes browser wide setting of language, where as it is very common here to install browser and OS with US locals, but still want to have European inputs.

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I wish it would be based on the site's html lang attribute instead of an OS/browser locale. Also the user can't even just type something like "20190504" to get 2019-05-04, because for some reason it accepts six characters for the year part and it becomes 201905-04-

Let me just type:

- 'Jan 7th 2013'

- 'November 1 1995'

- '1st Sep 2001'

Or any other non-ambiguous date should work

> it's not usable for Europeans as we tend to use dots.

We do? As a fellow European, I hardly see dots: mostly slashes or dashes.

German people use the dot notation for example

There could be some east west divide. But is seems to be widely used, for instance Germany seems to prefer dots. Someone has compiled a table here https://gist.github.com/mlconnor/1887156 not sure about it's accuracy.

Imho, everyone should use ISO8601[1] as standard. Then there'd be none of this 'it's an american who wrote it so it's the month first for some reason' rubbish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I'm an American that prefers YYYYMMDD and has used it exclusively in my career. As a developer with a lengthy deployment background and it's simply the superior way to go for dates for readability and sorting. Many like myself have 2 modes of operation, the 2nd being what business owners and executives are expecting. We couldn't force it on them if we wanted to. This often extends into English vs metric as well. I default on metric for everything I can. It may not be the American developer to blame but the average person around him. It's very surprising to me that after the American Revolution, we weren't eager and early adopters of the Metric system considering animosity towards the British was still lingering for some time.

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