[icu-core] Using "midnight" to mean the beginning of the day could be confusing

[Markus Scherer]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 2:04 AM, Mark Davis ☕️ <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:

> What I think we could do is change records like the following (NB
> "midnight" is an ID):
>
>    <dayPeriod type="midnight">Mitternacht</dayPeriod>
>
> to:
>
>    <dayPeriod type="midnight-sod">Mitternacht</dayPeriod>
>    <dayPeriod type="midnight-eod">Mitternacht</dayPeriod>
>
> Then ask translators to change these to be distinct, but only where there
> are different possible customary terms.
>
> Once this is done, in software, if they are the same we can suppress them
> in an ambiguous context, and show them where it is clear. (Of course, under
> the control of the formatting pattern.)
>
This sounds reasonable.

If we are stuck with the existing type="midnight" selector, then we could
add a type="midnight0", like there is morning1 & morning2.

I would expect
    <dayPeriodRule type="midnight" at="0:00"/>
to change to
    <dayPeriodRule type="midnight0" at="0:00"/>
    <dayPeriodRule type="midnight" at="24:00"/>

where both make sense (e.g., Chinese),
and I would expect that a lot of locales (e.g., German & English) would use
"the new midnight" (end of day) but not midnight0 (start of day).

In ICU, we would probably not format the midnight-at-end-of-day until we
figure out a way for a user to request Tuesday 24:00 as opposed to
Wednesday 0:00.

markus
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