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

[Mark Davis ☕️]

I think Shawn means the internal codes, that are translated.

{phone}
On Jan 22, 2016 10:32, "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

> 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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