| I'm generally in favor of killing off legacy systems and values if it means improved global consensus. Migrating to something new might bring a bit of initial discomfort but the result is worth it. As an American, I've given up or replaced a reasonable number of conventions with which I was brought up. With possible exceptions for certain historical or scientific context, everyone should use ISO 8601. This means the week starts on Monday, you write the date as [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD], and using 24-hour clocks. Switching to 24-hour clocks was the hardest change for me, but I eventually got used to it. I disagree with you that decimal mark and number separators should be localized. Resolution 10 of the 22nd CGPM [0] made declarations on both points, and their declarations have been supported by various standards bodies. Apparently ISO 80000-1:2009 is also in agreement, although I haven't been able to access the document to confirm. There is clear consensus that you should use a small space as the number separator. The decimal mark is a bit trickier since either comma or point are allowed. However, based on the following consideration from resolution 10: in Resolution 7 of the 9th General Conference, 1948, it is stated that "In numbers, the comma (French practice) or the dot (British practice) is used only to separate the integral part of numbers from the decimal part". One could argue that since we're using English we should just follow the British practice, so it's most reasonable to exclusively use the dot as the decimal mark and request that others stop using the wrong symbol. There's no good reason to support two symbols. Unsure what you mean by time zone indicators. Could you clarify? On the subject of time zones though... Dealing with scheduling across multiple time zones with varying DST behavior and moving observers can be really tricky to get right. People that don't use UTF-8 are just bad. It's fine to continue accepting input documents with other encodings, if only to make it easier for people to transition away from that. But don't encourage them by supporting saving or exporting documents with different encodings! [0] https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/Resol22CGPM-EN.pdf |