Until microsoft makes that the default down in the lower right corner, I don’t think we’ll make much headway. I’ve been trying to get my office to do their dated files in YYYYMMDDHHMM for years. I do mine that way but I can’t get anybody else to comply. This meme lists that as a discouraged format, I guess the dashes are ISO but I don’t care about the dashes. I would accept doing YYYY-MM-DD over MMDDYYYY any time though.
ISO 8601 recommends inserting a
Tbetween the calendar date portion and the time of day portion. So:20250501T2210+00.The dashes make it far easier for regular humans.
All my coworkers now know that’s how dates work… I send out all of the reports and they can tear YYYYMMDD out of my arthritis-ridden hands
The Microsoft thing is entirely regional. It’s not that Microsoft does dates a certain way, it’s your regional defaults. I live in a country that does dates the ISO and the computer displays them thay way.
Someone once told me that american date format follows the same pattern as regular speech. Like "26th of April, 2004. It made some sense to me, but that still feels a silly reason to discard just the sorting benefits.
ISO 8601 allows all kinds of crazy time stamps. RFC 3339 is much nicer and simpler, and the sweet spot is at the intersection of ISO 8601 and RFC 3339.
Then again, ISO 8601 contains some nice things that RFC 3339 does not, like ranges and durations, recurrences…
I regularly work with Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. So many times each group defaults to their own format and mistakes occur I gave up on all the formats listed by OP. If i have to write a date in correspondence its like: Feb 27th 2013. No ambiguity. No one has ever challenged me on it either. It is universally understood.
I prefer 27 Feb 2013, it’s how my work writes dates.
I prefer 27. Feb. 2013
That’s not very onionized of you
I prefer 13 Feb 27
My biggest point of professional pride was the time my boss sent a mass group text to all his employees asking them to format dates the way I do
He didn’t say it was the format I used, so I didn’t speak up and say “it’s actually ISO-8601,” because I assume my coworkers who were used to writing things like “February 27 8:00-4:45” rather than “2013-02-27 8:00-4:45 (8:45)” may stab me
Jokes on you, I can’t fucking rember which English month is which. April, May, July and Autum is just a grey mass to me.
Autumn is a season lol
I think you mean August.
September, October, November and December are easy to remember because they’re Roman numbers. 7-10 But two off because at some point they added July and August to honor Julius Augustus. So “month seven” is the 9th month.
Honestly I do remember some months, like starting and ending of the year. I don’t encounter English month names on a regular enough basis to remember their order and my month names in no way relate to English ones.
So anything after February and before August I have to google each time I encounter them.
It doesn’t help that we don’t even have month abbreviations like English does (Jan, Feb, etc.).
You meant 27th Feb 2013, right? It is utterly moronic to have day in the middle irrespectively if you start with or finish on the year.
I assume it depends on geographical region, but I’ve never heard someone say out loud “27th of February, 2013.” It’s always “February 27th, 2013.” Writing it down like that could be easier to parse for people who are used to that format
Let me guess - you are a USian?
No, I’m American
I want to get ahead of this debate, and point out that a) “American” as a demonym for literally anyone in the western hemisphere is largely useless, b) the USA is the only country which includes “America” in its name, and c) USian is not more precise because there are two countries with United States in their name.
No, I’m American. It looks like you started writing this comment before I made the edit to mine, so I’ll go ahead and copy/paste it here
a) “American” as a demonym for literally anyone in the western hemisphere is largely useless, b) the USA is the only country which includes “America” in its name, and c) USian is not more precise because there are two countries with United States in their name.
So, you are a USian. I thought so. I never ever heard someone saying “February 27th 2018”, I think only USians do that. Everywhere else it is 27th of February 2018 which is logical.
You meant 27th Feb 2013, right?
Does it matter anymore with this format? You figured out the exact day, month, and year irrespective of the order.
It’s not about understanding. It’s about sorting,
Everybody understand both notations, but if you use it for filenames sorting is important. Natural sorting order is an important feature that should be considered.
day month year is just stupid in that regard. Not only does the of the month depend on the language, but also if sorted you get the first of every month grouped together.
“Moronic” before and now “stupid”. Folks are very passionate about their date formats.
If you’re listing dates, then using a sortable format is ideal. But if you’re just referencing one in the middle of a correspondence, it’s best to use whatever format the recipient is most familiar with. No one is sorting emails by a date given in the third paragraph
Does it matter anymore
Possibly just the matter of logic.
I was introduced to ISO 8601 in the US military. Yay standardization!
2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
You know, I used to think ISO 8601 was just a boring technical standard for writing dates. But now I see it’s clearly the first step in a grand master plan! First, they make us write the year first, then the month, then the day-suddenly, our beloved 17.05.2025 turns into 2025-05-17. My birthday now looks like a WiFi password, and my calendar feels like a math equation.
But it doesn’t stop there. Today it’s the date format, tomorrow we’ll all be reading from right to left, and before you know it, our keyboards will be rearranged so QWERTY is replaced with mysterious squiggles and dots. Imagine the panic:
“First they came for our dates, then they came for our keyboards!”
At this rate, I’ll be drinking mint tea instead of coffee, my local kebab shop will start offering lutefisk shawarma, and Siri will only answer to “Inshallah.” The right-wing tabloids will have a field day:
“Western Civilization in Peril: Our Months and Days Held Hostage!”
But let’s be honest-if the worst thing that happens is we finally all agree on how to write today’s date, maybe world peace isn’t so far off. Until then, I’ll be over here, clutching my calendar and practicing my right-to-left reading skills… just in case.
(Don’t worry,this was just a joke! No offense intended-unless you’re a die-hard fan of confusing date formats, in which case, may the ISO be ever in your favor!)
Peace!
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Stupid smarch 2nd
As a Hungarian, I approve.
As an American, I can’t get people in my team to standardize their email signatures with correct spelling.
Feb 27th 2013
Boom. Everything is in a different format so you can order it however you want and it’s still readable.
Why use abbreviations in your preferred language when you can have a solution that is language-agnostic and universal (for a given calendar) ?
Because if there’s one problem simple enough that I trust an LLM or translation app not to fuck up, it’s simple translation of month labels from on language to another. If you’re writing in English, it’s reasonable to have month abbreviations in English. If someone wants to read it in a different language, they’re going to have to use translation software or hire a human translator to do it. And regardless of translation method, simple date translation will be among the most reliable and faithfully translated parts.
Or, you know, just use plain old numerals that almost everyone on earth can read and understand without needing a translation in the first place. Why the fuck do people need to bring LLMs where it’s not needed ? Is it to pump their NVDA stocks?
Upset we didn’t get a “Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago…”
Working for a global clinical research company, DD-Mmm-YYYY is the easiest for everyone to understand and be on the same page. It’s bad enough identifying which date you’re capturing in metadata without also trying to juggle multiple date formats.
Ohh, dashes.
5/1/2025. I’ll die on this hill.
I’ll see you in hell.
I’ll call the coroner.
Fifth January 2025?
Imagine a database, or even a folder with multiple years in it. “Payroll_05-01-2025”. Now all your files are sorted by month. You would have to scroll through “Payroll_05-08-1988”… etc forever before you reach 2025. And when you do, all of 2025 isn’t together. ISO 8601 solves these issues automatically. It’s time to adapt to a better system…
The 5th January 2025, correct.
m/d/y, so wrong by default
5/1/5 ?
Oh please. What’s next? A twelve hour time system with am and pm? Measuring distances in thumbs and other body parts?
Worse: measuring temperatures based on what one guy felt was the coldest it could get in the winter and the hottest his fever would reach.
Don’t be ridiculous, that’s just insane.
To be fair, “thumb” was only a unit in determinating what stick we could beat our wives with.
I feel like YYYYMMDD (without dashes) might be a format in ISO 8601, but I’m fully expecting to be corrected soon. But I didn’t say think, I said feel. YYYYMMDD has a similar vibe to YYYY-MM-DD, ya feel me?
Nope, you are correct! From the Wikipedia page, which cites the standards document:
- Representations can be done in one of two formats – a basic format with a minimal number of separators or an extended formatwith separators added to enhance human readability. The standard notes that “The basic format should be avoided in plain text.” The separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the hyphen, while the colon is used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds). For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as “2009-01-06” in the extended format or as “20090106” in the basic format without ambiguity.
So xkcd got a detail wrong? I’m cancelling my subscription!
It is. Photos and code merges use it.
2013-02-27 = 1984
Is there an ISO standard for how to say, “I don’t agree with a very specific aspect of your politics, or a specific statement one of your political heroes made, for a very specific reason, but I’m not declaring myself at the extreme horrible kitten-eating end of whatever political spectrum you live in.”
“Policies that destroy the biosphere are discouraged.” — ISO-0000
