Internationalising date formats

We are asked at Gmane if we users prefer the Iso8601 date format instead of the rfc2822. The Gmane-master isn't very convinced:

  iso8601: 2004-10-02 15:45:05  rfc2822: Sat, 02 Oct 2004 15:45:05 +0200 

ISO is much more friendly with languages other than English. rfc shows English words... However, for email storing purposes, to comply with the .mbox format and so, rfc looks better. ISO for showing at the web interface, RFC for storing in the backend.

Ideally, one should have the option to manage variables in the strings provided in the translation/l10n. That is, true i18n and l10n. That way, one could produce particular date formats...

Look at this welsh blog entry. It's in welsh, but you may understand the concept.

It's a method to display dates in Welsh at Blogger.com powered blogs. They do it through Javascript, parsing this variable that Blogger provides: $BlogDateHeaderDate$

That's a complicated way to do it. A simpler approach, with no weekday-names and so could be to use just numeral date variables. A Python solution used in Zope web applications:

  strftime(%Y-%m-%d) produces 2004-10-20  strftime(%d/%m/%Y) produces 20/10/2004  

The second one, more apt, for instance, for Spanish-looking dates.

This issue appeared at last month's thread List admin interface when discussion came into providing a localised/translated form to date formats.