Re: time-duration formats like "XXm XXs"

12:15 could look like a quarter after noon to not-so-smart-as-us people. 
 Others might mistake the duration for hours and minutes, since that is 
the notation used by most clocks.  At the same time, the other notations 
aren't common enough to make sense to everyone.
Have you considered and rejected 00:12:15 for any particular reason?  It 
may not be likely that your times could spill over into hours, but if it 
did, this would accommodate that.

Thanks,
Mary

Sean M. Burke wrote:

> I'm internationalizing Apache::MP3, and have come up against one 
> problem, almost the last one left:
> At one point, the module figures out the duration of things, and 
> stores them as like "12m 15s" for 12 minutes 15 seconds.  Clearly 
> that's good only for languages where "m" is the first letter of the 
> word for "minutes" and "s" is the first letter of the word for "seconds".
>
> So I'm curious: in your experience, is there a decent way to write 
> this that is acceptable for all languages?
> Looking at CDs from outside the US that I have, I see different 
> formats for a duration of 12 minutes 15 seconds:
>     12:15  (by far the most common)
>     12'15
>     12'15"
>     12.15
>
> Is 12:15 acceptable to everyone as a good way to write a duration of 
> 12minutes 15 seconds in your respective native languages?  I suppose 
> that it's ambiguous and could mean "12 hours 15 minutes", but in the 
> context of CD tracks (which is most of what Apache::MP3 is used for), 
> it's fairly clear from context that it doesn't mean that.  (I suppose 
> ":12:15" doesn't have this problem, but it looks very odd.)
>
> It so happens that it'd take some code reshuffling to have this one 
> bit be localized for each language, so I'm hoping that I can avoid 
> that by picking one format (presumably 12:15) that's at least 
> acceptable for most languages.
> Does anyone not like 12:15?
> -- 
> Sean M. Burke    http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
>