Using "midnight" to mean the beginning of the day could be confusing

[kz]

Dear CLDR users,

I'm currently trying to implement in ICU the pattern characters b and B for
datetime formatting, which involves the use of the word "midnight". See
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Day_Period_Rules .

Currently, according to the CLDR spec, the word "midnight" refers to 0:00,
i.e. the beginning of the day. However, after a conversation with my
colleagues, we feel that it's more natural for "midnight" to mean, at least
in English, the end of the day. For example, "Wednesday midnight" would
refer to midnight of Wednesday-Thursday, not the midnight of
Tuesday-Wednesday. This could cause confusion to users.

In addition, other languages could have different problems with the use of
"midnight". For example, Chinese has two different words for "midnight
(beginning of day)" (*lingchen*) and "midnight (end of day)" (*wuye*).

As such, it'd probably be worth discussing to either (1) remove "midnight"
as a time period, (2) use a different word for "midnight", or (3) modify
spec to have "midnight" refer to the end of the day.

Any opinions?


Thanks
kz
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