It that easy is not

I’m not sure how long this has been around, but Tumblr has some support for localizing themes, which means that you can write a single theme that supports all of the languages that Tumblr does. At least that’s how it works in theory. I say this because strings like the following indicate that it’s not at all complete:

{lang:Posted on DayOfMonth Month Year}
{lang:Posted on Month DayOfMonth Year}

I see things like this way too often, so let me say it loud and clear: The order of date elements varies from language to language. American English typically uses month-day-year (“February 17, 2012”), while in German the commonly accepted order is DMY (“17. Februar 2012”). A Tumblr theme can’t support both of these conventions without language-specific switching, which is what localization strings are supposed to eliminate in the first place.

Japanese date support is especially bad, for two reasons. First, the order is invariably year-month-day, which Tumblr doesn’t even provide an option for. Second, Japanese and Chinese require the use of date component suffixes when writing out full dates: 年 for the year, 月 for the month, and 日 for the day of the month. (Korean does this as well, except with hangul spellings for the Chinese characters.) A properly-formatted date looks like this:

2012年2月17日

Instead, at best, what Tumblr gives you is something like this:

17 2月 2012

The incorrect order is obvious; the month is the only element that retains its suffix because it’s allowed to be an arbitrary string of characters, while the other components are required to be numeric.

I don’t mean to rag specifically on Tumblr for this; it’s a problem I’ve encountered in numerous places, but one that stuck out to me here since I’ve been working on Dichotomy a little more lately. The proper solution is to have differing levels of detail for each template tag, not a specific order. Most operating systems have options for “short” (“2/17/2012”), “medium” (“February 17, 2012”), and “full” (“Friday, February 17, 2012”) date formats, and I think that’s the best example to follow here.

That’s all. I’ll leave the complaining about not having a template tag for ISO 8601 date formatting (which I need for <time>) for another day.