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

[Martin J. Dürst]

On 2016/01/22 18:08, Shawn Steele wrote:
> Is there a problem with a “midnight-end” and a “midnight-start”?

Not with the concepts. But I wouldn't want to use these labels as such 
in a user-facing message. But maybe that's not what you meant.

Regrads,   Martin.

> From: CLDR-Users [mailto:cldr-users-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Mark Davis ??
> Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2016 11:58 PM
> To: Martin J. Dürst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>
> Cc: cldr-users at unicode.org; kz <kazede at google.com>; ICU Core <icu-core at lists.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: Re: Using "midnight" to mean the beginning of the day could be confusing
>
> I think it really depends on context. I think the following, for example, refer to the same time, the instant between Tuesday and Wednesday.
>
>    *   Wednesday, I was wide awake from midnight to 5am.
>    *   Tuesday, the party lasted from 7pm to midnight.
> The context of a range makes it clear what was meant.
>
> I'm ok with holding back on using midnight, except when
>
>    1.  there is a word for midnight in the locale that (predominantly) means the start of the day (00:00).
>    2.  in time intervals (where the context is then clear enough). However, see below.
> Normally, date-time software views time-periods as half-open intervals. For example, the first hour of a day is from 00:00 to 00:59:59.9..., a day is from 00:00 to 23:59:59.9999..., a year is until Dec 31, 23:59:59.9999..., and so on.
>
> #2 is connected with a separate ticket which is to allow for the time-of-day to be formatted as being 24:00 or after. The primary use case for that is to allow time intervals (eg for opening hours) to span midnight, which are used in some countries, such as:
>
> Wednesday 18:00 – 25:00
>
> However, it could also allow for the use of a term "midnight" for 24:00, where that is the most natural expression.
>
> Mark
>
> Mark
>
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 7:40 AM, Martin J. Dürst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp<mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>> wrote:
> In my opinion, "could be confusing" is a gross understatement :-(. I just recently wanted to submit some abstracts to a conference where I spent about 10 minutes to figure out which end of a day the actual deadline was.
>
> While there may be conventions for such things in some communities, and CLDR has an ambition to follow them, it's highly confusing in the world wide context of the web. The less such things are made defaults, and the more exact terms are used (e.g. "midnight at the start of the day" or some such), the better.
>
> Regards,    Martin.
>
> On 2016/01/22 10:30, kz wrote:
> 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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