No because the year is a super large time; there's a reason people always say they take a bit to adjust to writing the new year in dates because it's s long enough period of time that it almost becomes automatic.
For archiving, sure; most other things, no (logically, ISO-8601 is probably the best for most cases, in general, but I'll die on the hill that MM-DD-YYYY is better than DD-MM-YYYY).
Again, โ within most use cases โ it really isn't.
In your day to day, will you need to know the year of a thing? Probably not; it's probably with the year you're currently in.
Do you need to know the day of the month first? Probably not unless it's within the current month so you need to know the month first.
Telling me "22nd" on a paper means nothing if I don't know what month we're referring to; and, if I do need to know the year, โ well โ it's always at the the of the date so it's easy to locate rather than parsing the middle of the date, any.
A pyramid is built bottom to top, not top to bottom. That's also one of the strengths of the ISO format. You can add/remove layers for arbitrary granularity and still have a valid date.
Yeah, but people read top to bottom. The best way to do it would be to have upside down pyramids. With the biggest blocks at the top representing the biggest unit of time (YYYY) and the smallest blocks at the bottom representing seconds & smaller.
I mean 11:40:20 in what NodaTime would call a "LocalDateTime". i.e., irrespective of the time zone.
(And incidentally, if you're working in C# I strongly recommend the NodaTime library. And even if you're not, I strongly recommend watching the lectures about dates and times by the NodaTime developer, who demonstrates a way of thinking about dates and times that is so much more thoughtful than what most standard libraries allow for without very careful attention paid by the programmer.)
That's an ISO date, and it's gorgeous. It's the only way I'll accept working with dates and timezones, though I'll make am exception for end-user facing output, and format it according to locale if I'm positive they're not going to feed into some other app.
It's incredibly annoying that in clinical research we are prohibited from using it because every date must comply with the GCP format (DD mmm yyyy). Every file has the GCP date appended to the end.
Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).
In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601
Sure, it means something, and the meaning is not stupid. But since it is the same standard, it should be possible to be used to at least somehow represent the same data. Which it doesn't.
I think it is reasonable to say: "for all representation of times (points in time, intervals and sets of points or intervals etc) we follow the same standard".
The alternative would be using one standard for points in time, another for intervals, another for time differences, another for changes to a timezone, another for ...
Standards are used to increase interoperability between systems. The more different standards a single system needs the harder it is to interface with other systems. If you have to define a list of 50 standard you use, chances are the other system uses a different standard for at least one of them.
Much easier if you rely on only a handful instead
True, that is reasonable. However sometimes it could be represented as scope creep. Depends on the thing, really. The more broad a standard is, the easier it is to deviate from given standard or not implement certain feature because there is not enough resources to do so.
I'd rather have multiple smaller standards than one big. However, I understand your reasoning.
if i am not wrong, it is because essentially both are same (slight differences in what is allowed and what is not, https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601), but RFC is more free as in freedom
I often have to refrain myself from using ISO-8601 in regular emails. In a business context the MM/DD/YYYY is so much more prevalent that I don't want to stand out.
Filenames on a share drive though? ISO-8601 all the way idgaf
Honestly look very readable to me, though I'm not sure on the timezone bit. Maybe they left it out? Ohterwise it's 26th of January 2025, 18:41
It's gonna be problematic when there's 5 digit years, but other than that it's... not good, but definitely less ambiguous than any "normally formatted" date where DD <= 12. Is it MM/DD or DD/MM? We'll never fucking know!
Of course, YYYY-MM-DD is still the king because it's both human readable and sortable as a regular string without converting it into a datetime object or anything.
All you'd have to do to make it much more readable is separate the time and the year with some kind of separator like a hyphen, slash or dot. Also "Z" is the time zone, denoting UTC (see also military time zones)
Maybe in programming or technical documentation, but no, when I check the date I want to know the day and the month, beyond that, it's all unnecessary information for everyday use, and we have it right in Europe.
That's not a good thing. That attitude limits you from improving how you do things because you've gotten emotionally attached to some arbitrary ... never mind. Have a nice day.
2025-01-26 so it's 26.01. It's easy to look up. All you need to know is that the date goes YYY-MM-DD (year -> month -> day). You do the same thing when you write 26.01 instead of 26.01.2025, since you are just dropping information about the year.
Starting out with "you can't change my mind" is fine but then don't argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked. Use whichever format you like better but don't pretend that's more than personal preference at that point.
The big argument for the iso date-time format is lexicographic ordering. If you don't care about that, then don't use it.
Just as a side-note: some european countries were in fact considering switching to the iso date-time format but didn't because it would have been an inconvenience to people already familiar with different formats. Basically the "it's better but people prefer the older format" thing we have going on in the comment sections right now.
donโt argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked.
I literally said I don't know what a thing means (and now that you've explained, it's a useless instruction to give me, since all it does is add extra steps for those of us already perfectly happy with the European format lmfao), and made no assertion beyond my personal preference, kindly get off your fucking high horse.
1-26 or 01/26 is a way of writing the month and day. in this particular example, it is describing the 26th day of January, or January 26. the year is omitted in this instance because, in this context, it is a way of demonstrating how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance without fully adhering to ISO 8601 guidelines.
So it's just adding the American format (which categorically does not demonstrate how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance, but literally the opposite) in to the mix and not providing any help or making things any simpler lol
Thanks for explaining, but if the person who introduced the 1-26 concept in to the conversation (and could have easily just said "MM/DD" to make their point significantly clearer), or the other person with their lecture are actually trying to change my, or anyone else's mind, or make theirpersonal preference more appealing to others, this (making things more complicated, when they are already perfectly straightforward, just not how they like it) isn't the fucking way to do it lmmfao
the "best" format for everyday use is each individual person's personal preference.
you may be more used to DDMMYYYY due to culture, language, upbringing, and usage. in the same vein, i am more used to YYYYMMDD because in chinese we go ๅนดๆๆฅ (year-month-day), and it makes organizing files and spreadsheet entries much more intuitive anyways.
Well in that case people should stop complaining about us wanting to use DD.MM.YYYY it's perfectly fine and the only format that should be shot on sight is MM.DD.YYYY
E: I even said how I can see it being useful in some applications, but fuck, if I'm looking at the date it's almost certainly to see what day it is today, what day (and maybe month) an appointment is, what day some food is going off, stuff like that. I know what month and year it is right now, and if I want to know the time, I look at a clock, not a calendar. If they love extra and often unnecessary information so much they're free to use whatever format they want, but I'm good, and so are many others, and they just need to learn to be ok with that lmao
yes, when the month is written non-numerically (and the year is written with four digits) there is no ambiguity.
but, the three formats in OP's post are all about writing things numerically.
In some contexts, writing out the full month name can be clearer (at least for speakers of the language you're writing in), but it takes more (and a variable amount of) space and the strings cannot be sorted without first parsing them into date objects.
Anywhere you want or need to write a date numerically, ISO-8601 is obviously much better and should always be used (except in the many cases where the stupid formats are required by custom or law).
That's the one that was active when I started typing. However, I change it randomly using the decay of a radioactive isotope that is randomly chosen by the decay of a separate amount of Uranium-238. I'm two randoms in. This way, my time records are always encrypted using open-science source and the government can't hack the pictures of my parking spots at the oncology center to sell them to the NIMBYs at MetAlphabet AI.
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right?
Because it's the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It's first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.
ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder
To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don't think I've ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that's not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.
The fact that you can't confuse it with other formats is precisely the advantage. With any other format (besides the awful lettered month) you have to use context clues to be sure you're reading it correctly if the day is less than 13.
Well you read the least frequently changing part first, the year, because if you read the seconds first, then the thing's already changed before you've even finished reading it.
/s
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
Maybe it's not least important for everyone?
Almost like the preference can change depending on application...
If I'm looking at a folder full of spreadsheets, one each month (or even day) for several years, and they are all titled according to YYYY-MM-DD. All you need to do is sort by filename and now you have it broken down by year, into one spreadsheet per month/day.
And only needed to click one button to sort them into an easily readable format.
Yeah it's funny seeing everyone in here thinking only of the one specific thing they use this for, not recognizing that the most useful order can change depending on the purpose of the data.
MM โ MM !!!
"Europe", as if there weren't several languages in Europe with different date formats per language...
Meh. It's getting a lot of hate here, but I think it works well in casual short term planning. Context (July) - > precision (15).
If I want to communicate the day in the current month, I just say the day, no month.
No because the year is a super large time; there's a reason people always say they take a bit to adjust to writing the new year in dates because it's s long enough period of time that it almost becomes automatic.
For archiving, sure; most other things, no (logically, ISO-8601 is probably the best for most cases, in general, but I'll die on the hill that MM-DD-YYYY is better than DD-MM-YYYY).
Why? Because you say so?
Because "context -> precision" is exactly the reason someone earlier gave as reasoning for the American system?
Again, โ within most use cases โ it really isn't.
In your day to day, will you need to know the year of a thing? Probably not; it's probably with the year you're currently in.
Do you need to know the day of the month first? Probably not unless it's within the current month so you need to know the month first.
Telling me "22nd" on a paper means nothing if I don't know what month we're referring to; and, if I do need to know the year, โ well โ it's always at the the of the date so it's easy to locate rather than parsing the middle of the date, any.
Exactly. It would be like reading the minute of the clock before the hour.
Not when you're old... I'll be 50 this year, they're flying by.
Then perish.
Keep that kinda talk up and you'll go straight to tariff!
This pyramid visualisation doesn't work for me, unless you read time starting with seconds.
A pyramid is built bottom to top, not top to bottom. That's also one of the strengths of the ISO format. You can add/remove layers for arbitrary granularity and still have a valid date.
Yeah, but people read top to bottom. The best way to do it would be to have upside down pyramids. With the biggest blocks at the top representing the biggest unit of time (YYYY) and the smallest blocks at the bottom representing seconds & smaller.
Offene Feldschlacht betritt den Raum
2025-01-26-11-40-20
I get it, just pyramids are misleading, also year-month-day is better because resulting number always grows. ๐บ
A bit out of context, but is your username and instance a reference to nescafe?
Not really but now that you mentioned it, it will! ๐
That's an interesting coincidence
2025-01-26T11:40:20, you mean?
Hold on there pal that time zone is ambiguous. Did you mean 11:40:20 UTC? If so, donโt forget your Z!
I mean 11:40:20 in what NodaTime would call a "LocalDateTime". i.e., irrespective of the time zone.
(And incidentally, if you're working in C# I strongly recommend the NodaTime library. And even if you're not, I strongly recommend watching the lectures about dates and times by the NodaTime developer, who demonstrates a way of thinking about dates and times that is so much more thoughtful than what most standard libraries allow for without very careful attention paid by the programmer.)
Yeah
I work with international clients and use 2025-01-26 format. Without it.. confusion.
That's an ISO date, and it's gorgeous. It's the only way I'll accept working with dates and timezones, though I'll make am exception for end-user facing output, and format it according to locale if I'm positive they're not going to feed into some other app.
I'm almost 40 and now just realizing my insistence on how to structure all my folders and notes is actually an ISO standard. Way to go me.
I stumbled upon it years ago because sorting by name sorts by date. There was no other thought put into it.
It's incredibly annoying that in clinical research we are prohibited from using it because every date must comply with the GCP format (DD mmm yyyy). Every file has the GCP date appended to the end.
I don't know why anyone would ever argue against this. Least precise to most precise. Like every other number we use.
(I don't know if this is true for EVERY numerical measure, but I'm sure someone will let me know of one that doesn't)
You misunderstand my comment.
I'm saying the digits in a date should be printed in an order dictated by which units give the most precision.
A year is the least precise, a month is the next least, followed by day, hour, minute, second, millisecond.
I think I went to high school with that guy.
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
Ftfy
My stupid ass read this top to bottom and I was confused why anyone would start with seconds
All my homies hate ISO, RFC 3339 for the win.
Said no-one ever?
EDIT: thanks for informing me i now retract my position
Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).
Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.
In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard.
P1Yis a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601P1Y is period notation. It means a Period of 1 Year. It actually makes decent sense tbh.
Sure, it means something, and the meaning is not stupid. But since it is the same standard, it should be possible to be used to at least somehow represent the same data. Which it doesn't.
I think it is reasonable to say: "for all representation of times (points in time, intervals and sets of points or intervals etc) we follow the same standard".
The alternative would be using one standard for points in time, another for intervals, another for time differences, another for changes to a timezone, another for ...
More reasonable, if you ask me. At least I came to value modularity in programming, maybe with standards it doesn't work as good, but I don't see why
Standards are used to increase interoperability between systems. The more different standards a single system needs the harder it is to interface with other systems. If you have to define a list of 50 standard you use, chances are the other system uses a different standard for at least one of them. Much easier if you rely on only a handful instead
True, that is reasonable. However sometimes it could be represented as scope creep. Depends on the thing, really. The more broad a standard is, the easier it is to deviate from given standard or not implement certain feature because there is not enough resources to do so.
I'd rather have multiple smaller standards than one big. However, I understand your reasoning.
if i am not wrong, it is because essentially both are same (slight differences in what is allowed and what is not, https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601), but RFC is more free as in freedom
Thx i take that back
I know, why don't we all agree to agree and use every single possible format within a shared spreadsheet
Oh god it's so true...
finally a correct version of this diagram
I use ss/mm/hh/dd/MM/YYYY
t.european
In one work report, I recorded the date as "1/13/25", "13/1/25" and "13JAN2025"
I have my preference, but please for the love of all that is fluffy in the universe, just stick to one format....
"13.1.25", not "13/1/25".
I often have to refrain myself from using ISO-8601 in regular emails. In a business context the MM/DD/YYYY is so much more prevalent that I don't want to stand out.
Filenames on a share drive though? ISO-8601 all the way idgaf
Mmm US military date and time is fun too.
DDMMMYYYYHHMM and time zone identifier. So 26JAN20251841Z.
So much fun.
So virtually human unreadable and the letters make machine readability a pain in the ass?
Honestly look very readable to me, though I'm not sure on the timezone bit. Maybe they left it out? Ohterwise it's 26th of January 2025, 18:41
It's gonna be problematic when there's 5 digit years, but other than that it's... not good, but definitely less ambiguous than any "normally formatted" date where DD <= 12. Is it MM/DD or DD/MM? We'll never fucking know!
Of course, YYYY-MM-DD is still the king because it's both human readable and sortable as a regular string without converting it into a datetime object or anything.
All you'd have to do to make it much more readable is separate the time and the year with some kind of separator like a hyphen, slash or dot. Also "Z" is the time zone, denoting UTC (see also military time zones)
Oh, duh. It's why all my timestamps have Z's in the database lmao
Thing is, you're right that the separation would help, but this is still way less ambiguous that MM/DD vs DD/MM if you ask me.
As my friend used to say, there's dumb and then there's Army Dumb.
Maybe in programming or technical documentation, but no, when I check the date I want to know the day and the month, beyond that, it's all unnecessary information for everyday use, and we have it right in Europe.
You can't change my mind. ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
That's not a good thing. That attitude limits you from improving how you do things because you've gotten emotionally attached to some arbitrary ... never mind. Have a nice day.
just nitpicking, but technically ISO 8601 does not (currently) permit the omission of the year.
if information is to be omitted, it must be done in ascending order of significance, so you can omit, in order, seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
(if you omit the month, that's just the year left so why bother with ISO 8601 lmao)
Fair
I don't know what this means, also I don't have to adhere to anything, the European format works perfectly well for me, so.. ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
2025-01-26 so it's 26.01. It's easy to look up. All you need to know is that the date goes YYY-MM-DD (year -> month -> day). You do the same thing when you write 26.01 instead of 26.01.2025, since you are just dropping information about the year.
Starting out with "you can't change my mind" is fine but then don't argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked. Use whichever format you like better but don't pretend that's more than personal preference at that point.
The big argument for the iso date-time format is lexicographic ordering. If you don't care about that, then don't use it.
Just as a side-note: some european countries were in fact considering switching to the iso date-time format but didn't because it would have been an inconvenience to people already familiar with different formats. Basically the "it's better but people prefer the older format" thing we have going on in the comment sections right now.
Cheers
The metric system has entered the chat.
I literally said I don't know what a thing means (and now that you've explained, it's a useless instruction to give me, since all it does is add extra steps for those of us already perfectly happy with the European format lmfao), and made no assertion beyond my personal preference, kindly get off your fucking high horse.
1-26 or 01/26 is a way of writing the month and day. in this particular example, it is describing the 26th day of January, or January 26. the year is omitted in this instance because, in this context, it is a way of demonstrating how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance without fully adhering to ISO 8601 guidelines.
So it's just adding the American format (which categorically does not demonstrate how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance, but literally the opposite) in to the mix and not providing any help or making things any simpler lol
Thanks for explaining, but if the person who introduced the 1-26 concept in to the conversation (and could have easily just said "MM/DD" to make their point significantly clearer), or the other person with their lecture are actually trying to change my, or anyone else's mind, or make their personal preference more appealing to others, this (making things more complicated, when they are already perfectly straightforward, just not how they like it) isn't the fucking way to do it lmmfao
These people are just too far into the ISO rabbit hole. I completely agree with you that DD.MM.YYYY is the best format for everyday use.
the "best" format for everyday use is each individual person's personal preference.
you may be more used to DDMMYYYY due to culture, language, upbringing, and usage. in the same vein, i am more used to YYYYMMDD because in chinese we go ๅนดๆๆฅ (year-month-day), and it makes organizing files and spreadsheet entries much more intuitive anyways.
Well in that case people should stop complaining about us wanting to use DD.MM.YYYY it's perfectly fine and the only format that should be shot on sight is MM.DD.YYYY
Thank you! ๐
E: I even said how I can see it being useful in some applications, but fuck, if I'm looking at the date it's almost certainly to see what day it is today, what day (and maybe month) an appointment is, what day some food is going off, stuff like that. I know what month and year it is right now, and if I want to know the time, I look at a clock, not a calendar. If they love extra and often unnecessary information so much they're free to use whatever format they want, but I'm good, and so are many others, and they just need to learn to be ok with that lmao
Nah. Sort that alphabetically and you end up with a useless list.
And sorting the other formats alphabetically does not yield the same result?
No...?
Okay I don't think I quite get which part you are sorting alphabetically here.
i never saw year first in Europe.
You're reading the post backwards.
This is Belize and Micronesia erasure.
I just use millis since epoch
(Recently learned that this isn't accurate because it disguises leap seconds. The standard was fucked from the start)
Hot take: 2025-Jan-27 is better than 2025-01-27 in monolingual contexts.
The beautiful part of 2025/01/27 is that it can inherently be sorted without formatting.
Let's do it!
DD-MMM-YYYY master race
Don't you mean: "Right there! Stop you, I'm going to."
Yoda-ass date structure.
What day, of what month, of what year is it? It's ordered by importance dammit!
25th of July, 2024 is confusing?
There's no ambiguity with the format, since it's impossible to mix up month and day
yes, when the month is written non-numerically (and the year is written with four digits) there is no ambiguity.
but, the three formats in OP's post are all about writing things numerically.
In some contexts, writing out the full month name can be clearer (at least for speakers of the language you're writing in), but it takes more (and a variable amount of) space and the strings cannot be sorted without first parsing them into date objects.
Anywhere you want or need to write a date numerically, ISO-8601 is obviously much better and should always be used (except in the many cases where the stupid formats are required by custom or law).
No. But 2024, the 25th of July is clumsy both spoken and written.
July 25th, 2024 is okay but gives off middle child vibes.
25th of July, 2024 is ordered small to big, rolls off the tongue and when written nicely seperates both sets of numbers for ease of readability.
The only other alternative I will accept is Julian dates. Today is Day 26 of 2025.
The fuck does that even mean? This is literally how people speak dates out loud.
It means it gives off middle child vibes. What more do you want?
People round these parts say the day first, then the month. Anything else is attention seeking middle child vibes.
Wrong format. DD.MM.YYYY.
Y'all be riskin it without holocene crypty
SYSM:YY.DM.TzYDY.H.H
4:40.42p EST on Jan 28, 12,025 ->
That's the one that was active when I started typing. However, I change it randomly using the decay of a radioactive isotope that is randomly chosen by the decay of a separate amount of Uranium-238. I'm two randoms in. This way, my time records are always encrypted using open-science source and the government can't hack the pictures of my parking spots at the oncology center to sell them to the NIMBYs at MetAlphabet AI.
Server had been down for about two days but just got it crossposted there, thanks!
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.
Because it's the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It's first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.
Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder
Arent there uses other than ordering files?
The ISO standard is best for ordering files, but that doesnt mean its good for other things
Its impossible to confuse it with the other 2 presented in this post so you could use it for files and use another one for other things
Edit: i may have been misunderstanding the context in which the ISO standard is claimed to be superior
Europe: 10/12/2025 USA: 12/10/2025 If you donโt have context as to which system this is, would 2025/12/10 make things less ambiguous?
To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don't think I've ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that's not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.
The fact that you can't confuse it with other formats is precisely the advantage. With any other format (besides the awful lettered month) you have to use context clues to be sure you're reading it correctly if the day is less than 13.
Well you read the least frequently changing part first, the year, because if you read the seconds first, then the thing's already changed before you've even finished reading it. /s
What about evenly distancing the 3 shortest time intervals to promote fast reading
mm:DD:MM:ss:YYYY:hh
I often see the year being the most important in my archive. Followed by month, then day (which is often left out because the document is monthly).
And the why; because it sorts alphabetically.
Maybe it's not least important for everyone?
Almost like the preference can change depending on application...
If I'm looking at a folder full of spreadsheets, one each month (or even day) for several years, and they are all titled according to YYYY-MM-DD. All you need to do is sort by filename and now you have it broken down by year, into one spreadsheet per month/day.
And only needed to click one button to sort them into an easily readable format.
You can skip the year and just do 1-26
Sometimes you need the year
Yeah it's funny seeing everyone in here thinking only of the one specific thing they use this for, not recognizing that the most useful order can change depending on the purpose of the data.
It's sorted by the length of time, so a day is shorter than a month.
obvious troll is obvious