Not quite months, but definitely weeks 😂 Obsidian can be such a rabbit hole. If I tweak that last template one more time, then I’ll finally be done, I swear!
So I'm like 80% done with my setup. Mostly focused on routine and habit templates, homepage wiki for pkm etc.. between the plugins and css, no matter which device I'm on, it's the slowest app I've ever used. This is why I pushed my old setup and started over clean with more knowledge. I don't know how to get the customization I want without insane unusable lag
It's called feeling seen and finding you're not alone. Do you type "# " while screen sharing in work apps to no avail and the chagrin of colleagues? It's okay. Me too.
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don't have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn't strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as '2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf') you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
The joke is that they've not been given in ISO8601 format, and also that they're both ambiguous. For the second one, we can't even tell which of the ends is the year.
Might be the best xkcd alt text of all time. I knew if from memory, and as soon as I saw the comic I thought "I bet someone quoted the alt text in the top comment".
There are several people in the comments saying they have to use 27 Feb 2013 because they work with people all over the world. I’m really confused - what does that solve that 2013-02-13 does not? I know that not every language spells months the English way so “Dec” or “May” aren’t universal. Is there some country that regularly puts year day month that would break using ISO 8601 or RFC 3339?
I think learning all abbreviations for different months in different languages is more complicated than just learning that the time is sorted from largest to smallest unit.
I know, right! I've been campaigning for this for everyday numbers. For example, twenty seven should be written smallest first: 72. Likewise this year is 5202, and next year 6202. That way no-one's going to be confused at all.
27 Feb 2013 is unambiguous- regardless of where you're from or how you write your dates, you can't confuse 2013 for the month or day, you can't confuse Feb for a day or week, and if you can't figure 27 out, then we have bigger problems!
Not the month, the day - What's today's actual date?
Like I was saying, if you'd let me finish, "2025 - 02 - 27"
I'm mostly joking, but when it comes to info about dates, I think the most evctive format it one that organizes the information within a heirachy that provides follow up answers.
Formatting dates as day / month / year does just that.
Provides the day it is, followed by the month and year as that is the order that information is usually needed in.
I find providing the year first (or month) is much more ambiguous as neither are the day the actual date falls on.
If you need to ask for the current date so often, I suggest getting a watch. (not sure if joking vs predisposed for this part)
If you're asking so often about recent things then, yes, hearing the redundant parts out loud is only irksome because they've already been delivered to you (by yourself).
On the other hand, if you're asking someone when an arbitrary event happened (e.g. when reminiscing), having the year first quickens context.
Counterpoint: What you say applies in daily life, not when querying an archive of any kind. Year-month-day is the natural sorting order if the question is "which file/folder/column in the spreadsheet is the one I need?" In which case you narrow it down to first the year, then the month, then the day.
I started using YYYY-MM-DD to name files and directories once I noticed that they then became automatically sorted chronologically when I sort the containing directory alphabetically by file name.
I used to work for a company that agreed with you, well at least some clown in management did. Even though it was an Australian company, at least part of the problem was we had an office in Manila, and they speak "American English" which seemed to include the awful date system too.
We dealt with a lot of files being issued to clients / received from vendors etc. Because the "official" system used those fucked up dates, everyone ran their own secondary sets of data folders in / out with everything done in ISO dates so you could actually sort it properly.
It solves the familiarity problem, when getting somebody to do something by a date they readily understand at a glance takes precedence over making everybody in the world change a lifelong habit.
When someone asks you what date it is, no one says it's 2025 May 5th.
We all know what year it is, and we all know what month we are in. It's the day component that is usually the unknown.
Guilty of that myself this very day. I did it a very spectacular way too. Some coworkers came up to me and said "man, April was a busy month for you!" I boldly replied "and it ain't even over yet!"
I was promptly corrected.
That's locality of reference, though, similar to how you can say "here" or "there" for spatial coordinates. Everybody is aware of the year and month, so you omit it as given. The order of significance is still year, month, day.
Imagine if a harried time traveler jumped out of their time machine and asked you the date. Would it make sense to say, "Why, it's the 1st." (Or more possible, if a friend awoke from a coma.) If you ask somebody when they were born, most people will give the year at minimum. Of course, there are some weirdos out there, and you recognize them when you ask when they were born, and they say, "on a Tuesday." Same for the date of the Norman invasion of Great Britain. If you don't already have some sense of history, then knowing it happened about the 20th isn't very edifying.
I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.
English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of Saturn
Imagine dating a meeting, "Day of Odin, May 7, 2025." Imagine a store receipt that says, "Day of Thor, June 5, 2025." Imagine telling a friend, "July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!"
THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.
We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let's remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!
The sane way of dealing with it is to use UTC everywhere internally and push local time and local formatting up to the user facing bits. And if you move time around as a string (e.g. JSON) then use ISO 8601 since most languages have time / cron APIs that can process it. Often doesn't happen that way though...
Generally yes, that's the way to do it, but there are plenty of times where you need to recreate the time zone something was created for, which means additionally storing the time zone information.
ISO 8601 goes from 1582 (Julian calendar adoption) but can go even further with agreement about intention and goes down beyond the millisecond. Not sure why I want an integer from the year 2000 which only represents seconds.
Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.
Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.
It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.
The clue was in "user facing bits". UTC represents time as an absolute. If you want to show local time, or deal with daylight savings you run UTC through a function on its way to the user.
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 figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the "official" format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there's no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y'all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I'm playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
That's where I started. I wanted a little project to try V on, and had come across the IFC, so I wrote a thing. While I was doing that, I got to thinking about the deficiencies and inherited complexities in IFC, and thought up Saturnalia.
If you pop up to my profile in Sourcehut, you'll find a similar program - just a lot longer and more complex, for IFC.
I don't know if they makes me a genius, but yes. Yes it does.
Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib's day) with a name but no numerical date.
Hey, I quite like this! You're the first person I've found that's thought of fixing the calendar by adopting six-day weeks. I have a very similar personal version, with two main differences:
there's a leap week instead of a leap day, that way weekdays are always the same without having to skip any and every year has a whole number of weeks (either 61 most years [roughly 7 out of every 8] or 60 on short years [roughly 1 out of every 8])
December includes this leap week and it's either 30 or 36 days long, depending on the year. I put it at the end of December for the same logic that you put Saturnalia at the end of the year, to not mess with cardinal dates and so that the Xth day of the year is always the same date
I also came to the same conclusion about workweeks. With two-day weekends, the Gregorian calendar has 71 % of workdays but the new calendar only has 67 %. On a thirty-day month this means 20 workdays instead of 21,5. Having the six-day week could also theoretically allow for a move to three- or two-day weeks in a post-scarcity future and doing away with weekends, as well has having either 50 % or 67 % of the workforce being active every day of the week, and not the wild levels of fluctuation seen today. Not having 100 % commuting some days of the week and a fraction of that on others would allow to scale things like transport infrastructure much more effectively
Only in eight year chunks. By year seven there is more unalignment than there was in year one, but it goes back to normal on year eight. Same thing as with leap days, just a slightly bigger scale.
Ok, so, first, let me say that while I'm enthusiastic about the concept, I understand it's entirely theoretical. We can't even get US civilians to adopt metric, FFS. Just a caveat, lest anyone wander by and overhear us.
That said, I did spend some cycles trying to see it it would be possibly to line up a lunar and solar calendar, and it's not. And it isn't nearly as important as it used to be. It would still have been nice.
So if you do run calculations, I'd like to see them.
Here they are! Orange represents my Leapweek calendar and blue is Gregorian. The Y-axis is deviation from the tropical year and the X-axis is the year number. It's a 19200-year cycle to allow for both Gregorian and Leapweek to do entire iterations of their 400-year and 768-year cycles, respectively.
The Gregorian rules are, as you already know: if a year is divisible by 4, it is a leap year; unless it is divisible by 100, when it is a common year; unless it is also divisible by 400, in which case it is actually a leap year.
My Leapweek rules are: years divisible by 8, are leap (short, with 360 days instead of the usual 366) years, as are years divisible by 768 (after subtracting 4 so as not to clash with years divisible by 8). Just two rules as opposed to Gregorian's three, but they result in almost perfect correction: it takes 625 000 years to fall out of sync by 1 day, as opposed to Gregorian's 3 216 years for the same amount)
The catch is that Leapweek falls out of sync by up to 5½ days either way in between 768-year cycles, and up to 2½ days either way in between 8-year cycles. But they average out.
About the lunisolar I'm afraid to say that I ran into the same issue. Lunations are a very inconvenient duration to try and fit into neat solar days and months.
I wish it weren't as theoretical, because I really like this calendar, but yea. It's one of those things that will be impossible to change even though there's arguably better options. It's too arbitrary yet too essential and it goes in the same box as the metric second/minute/hour, the dozenal system and the Holocene calendar.
Here's a challenge though: try and devise a Martian calendar! That one is not standardised yet. I had good fun trying to match the Martian sol and year to metric units of time and maybe giving some serious use to the kilosecond, megasecond and gigasecond
As an extra, here's a 1000-year version of the graph at the start of the reply, with the current year 12 025 of the Holocene calendar :^) in the middle
This is fantastic. I'm going to have to spend more time with it.
Since we're discussing timescales over which there's a not insignificant chance something radical will happen to society, there's also the fact that the day is getting longer by 2ms every hundred years. If you're scheduling out 625,000 years, that's 12-some seconds by the end, compounded - 6 extra seconds every day by the 312,000th year, etc.
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.
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
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.).
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I work at a global company an in my team there are people from 5 continents. we use 27-Feb-23. It's the only way nobody gets confused and it's only 1 char more. (Tbf nobody would be confused only my boss that is american lol)
In the last company I work for, the department was created from zero, and my boss just let me take all the technical decisions so from the begging everything was wrote in ISO-8601. When I left it was just the way it was, if you try to use any other date format anywhere something is going to give you an error.
ISO 8601 contains way too many obscure formats. RFC 3339 is pretty much a subset and defines only sensible ones. It also allows 2018-02-05 08:02:43-00:00 (no T and explicitly specifying no timezone)
Acquiring the document (legally) to ensure compliance for ISO 8601 is relatively expensive for a single person (~$200 USD), while RFC 3339 is accessible for free.
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!)
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."
Do you mean the post titles? I've been using the same format as was used since before I took over posting, but if people want ISO format that works for me
I deal with a lot of old records and boy I really prefer iso when you have to look at a lot of dates and things are in all different years, it's helpful. Have you tried ISO? I also do a lot of international work and haven't heard complaints about it being confusing.
I just don't like to be forced to include the damn year everytime, and if you cut the year from ISO 8601 you get the american MM-DD order, which everybody hates.
If it's just in casual conversation or emails DD/MM/YYYY is fine, but if you're naming documents or something in a professional setting, you should really always include the year anyway.
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.
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?
For your example, maybe. If someone writes 8/3/2012, you don't know which is month/day. And if they shorten it to 08/03/12 you literally can't even conclusively determine the year, much less the month or day...
That's what we Europeans call a "petty answer to the disgrace that is Amarican military time" (not the be confused with regular Amarican time and dates, which don't allow overflow, as far as I'm aware). The date described above is clearly "the second of March, 2015" or 2015-03-02.
This standard would have probably caught on if they wouldn't have gone and made it backwards.
Objectively you are more likely to need to know the day first, then the month then the year, and when people get lazy they always just leave off the year because it is assumed, but if the year is first you have to say the whole thing or sound stupid.
Depends on the purpose. For documents (especially those on which people work collaboratively over long periods of time) I find YYYY-MM-DD ideal. It spares the issues around day or month first when Europeans and people from the US work together, the document are easy to sort and, if it takes more than a year to complete the project (as is often the case in research) things don't get messy.
In daily speech you're correct, but the ISO standard isn't meant for daily speech. It's meant for timestamps and archives that can be queried in a systematic manner. In that case, the natural ordering is to narrow down the search by year-month-day.
Why would I gaf about years? Most of the time I do t even use years for anything and yes I prefer to read day first, month second, year isn’t even necessary depending of the situation
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...
Rich is right, since this is the date format that sorts correctly in filenames.
And it is easily extensible to YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to include the time of day
Are you an obsidian user?
Haha yep, you caught me. I’m a fan of the unique note feature
I've never met a fellow Templatr in the wild lol
My daily note broke and my life fell apart for a minute.
Have you also spent months building your Data Capture Workflow mermaid.js? 😅😬
Not quite months, but definitely weeks 😂 Obsidian can be such a rabbit hole. If I tweak that last template one more time, then I’ll finally be done, I swear!
So I'm like 80% done with my setup. Mostly focused on routine and habit templates, homepage wiki for pkm etc.. between the plugins and css, no matter which device I'm on, it's the slowest app I've ever used. This is why I pushed my old setup and started over clean with more knowledge. I don't know how to get the customization I want without insane unusable lag
I feel called out and I’m hiding in the bushes reading comments.
It's called feeling seen and finding you're not alone. Do you type "# " while screen sharing in work apps to no avail and the chagrin of colleagues? It's okay. Me too.
Won't be true after 9999-12-31, however.
Oh no! The Y10K bug!
Can't wait for the Y40k bug, when Tyranids begin to infect our brains.
Bold of you to assume there isn't already a genestealer cult on Terra. Washington specifically.
That...would explain a lot
Can be solved with a small shellscript adding a leading zero to all filenames with the format.
If I, my software, or my data last this long, I will have nearly 8000 years to resolve it. Which is to say, the year 9998 is going to get busy.
natural sort ftw
If humanity survives until then, we can implement 9-digit dates and delay the problem until Y100K.
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don't have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn't strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as '2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf') you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
I bet you could make a one liner to rename files with YYYY-MM-DD to 0YYYY-MM-DD fairly easily. Not a problem.
It's an easy fix at least, just check if you're comparing numbers on both sides and switch to a simple numerical sort.
I think Windows used to get this wrong, but it was fixed so long ago that I'm not even sure now.
Who's Rich? Did you mean Randall?
...dammit, the only comics I read are XKCD and OOTS and I done fucked up.
How can you sleep on Oglaf
The good ones tend to filter their way out.
(I do also read whatever John Allison is currently working on.)
Banished to back in time to hang with Ozy and Millie
Omg thank you!! Everyone sees my notes thinks I'm crazy for obsessing... It's the correct fucking sort!
Alt text:
But… that’s not the right way. Are you saying the ISO8601 violates ISO8601?
The joke is that they've not been given in ISO8601 format, and also that they're both ambiguous. For the second one, we can't even tell which of the ends is the year.
Honestly Randall absolutely would put the year in the middle just to fuck with us
Publication 1988-06-05, latest amendment 2004-12-01.
I almost expected the two dates to use different formats, but no, they're just both "the American way".
Well you can only cram in so many jokes at once. Would have been funny though
Knowing Americans it's probably the middle.
You found the joke
Might be the best xkcd alt text of all time. I knew if from memory, and as soon as I saw the comic I thought "I bet someone quoted the alt text in the top comment".
I am a big fan of iso 8601, I just wish it was possible to write more dates than February 27th, 2013 with it
Harhar
Yeh but for that one day though, everything just works so well.
There are several people in the comments saying they have to use 27 Feb 2013 because they work with people all over the world. I’m really confused - what does that solve that 2013-02-13 does not? I know that not every language spells months the English way so “Dec” or “May” aren’t universal. Is there some country that regularly puts year day month that would break using ISO 8601 or RFC 3339?
I think learning all abbreviations for different months in different languages is more complicated than just learning that the time is sorted from largest to smallest unit.
No! It’s the other way around, from largest to smallest is a mess and it makes no sense
If you name files or other data with ISO 8601 then they're always sorted chronologically when you go largest to smallest.
I know, right! I've been campaigning for this for everyday numbers. For example, twenty seven should be written smallest first: 72. Likewise this year is 5202, and next year 6202. That way no-one's going to be confused at all.
What you said is stupid
So true, bestie! That's why all the clocks in my house are formatted ss:mm:hh
27 Feb 2013 is unambiguous- regardless of where you're from or how you write your dates, you can't confuse 2013 for the month or day, you can't confuse Feb for a day or week, and if you can't figure 27 out, then we have bigger problems!
2013-02-27 is also unambiguous unless you’re aware of a country that uses year day month, is not?
2013-02-03 though. Someone would fuck it up
Hey what's today's date?
It's 2025 -
No like the DAY?
Yeah, it's 2025, 02 -
Not the month, the day - What's today's actual date?
Like I was saying, if you'd let me finish, "2025 - 02 - 27"
I'm mostly joking, but when it comes to info about dates, I think the most evctive format it one that organizes the information within a heirachy that provides follow up answers.
Formatting dates as day / month / year does just that. Provides the day it is, followed by the month and year as that is the order that information is usually needed in.
I find providing the year first (or month) is much more ambiguous as neither are the day the actual date falls on.
Wow, what a relatable use-case...
I was said that western mindset goes from small scale to larger scale, like 02-05-2025. Hmm, maybe that's West vs East propaganda material?
We need to get rid of the month/day and just refer to days by number. Today is day 121 in the year 2025, it's super clear.
Why bother with years, it’s day 1,456,7834
That's an interesting epoch. Almost, but not quite, 40,000 years ago
If you need to ask for the current date so often, I suggest getting a watch. (not sure if joking vs predisposed for this part)
If you're asking so often about recent things then, yes, hearing the redundant parts out loud is only irksome because they've already been delivered to you (by yourself).
On the other hand, if you're asking someone when an arbitrary event happened (e.g. when reminiscing), having the year first quickens context.
Counterpoint: What you say applies in daily life, not when querying an archive of any kind. Year-month-day is the natural sorting order if the question is "which file/folder/column in the spreadsheet is the one I need?" In which case you narrow it down to first the year, then the month, then the day.
I started using YYYY-MM-DD to name files and directories once I noticed that they then became automatically sorted chronologically when I sort the containing directory alphabetically by file name.
Time travelers would have to endure a few less awkward moments though.
Which I was the justification used when my work decided to use 2025-May-01.
It’s close enough to the iso date that nobody will be confused but with that 1 extra layer of security blanket to separate months and days.
Of course, that does ruin sorting, so I think it was a bit silly, nobody has ever used yyyyddmm so it’s all a bit theoretical to me.
I used to work for a company that agreed with you, well at least some clown in management did. Even though it was an Australian company, at least part of the problem was we had an office in Manila, and they speak "American English" which seemed to include the awful date system too. We dealt with a lot of files being issued to clients / received from vendors etc. Because the "official" system used those fucked up dates, everyone ran their own secondary sets of data folders in / out with everything done in ISO dates so you could actually sort it properly.
27 Feb is no more or less ambiguous than 02-27. The problems are when you choose a proper example, like 03/02
It solves the familiarity problem, when getting somebody to do something by a date they readily understand at a glance takes precedence over making everybody in the world change a lifelong habit.
When someone asks you what date it is, no one says it's 2025 May 5th. We all know what year it is, and we all know what month we are in. It's the day component that is usually the unknown.
Literally had two coworkers today that did not realize it was May
Guilty of that myself this very day. I did it a very spectacular way too. Some coworkers came up to me and said "man, April was a busy month for you!" I boldly replied "and it ain't even over yet!" I was promptly corrected.
Writing dates is usually in order to keep track for the future, when the year and month may be different.
That's locality of reference, though, similar to how you can say "here" or "there" for spatial coordinates. Everybody is aware of the year and month, so you omit it as given. The order of significance is still year, month, day.
Imagine if a harried time traveler jumped out of their time machine and asked you the date. Would it make sense to say, "Why, it's the 1st." (Or more possible, if a friend awoke from a coma.) If you ask somebody when they were born, most people will give the year at minimum. Of course, there are some weirdos out there, and you recognize them when you ask when they were born, and they say, "on a Tuesday." Same for the date of the Norman invasion of Great Britain. If you don't already have some sense of history, then knowing it happened about the 20th isn't very edifying.
I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.
English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of Saturn
Imagine dating a meeting, "Day of Odin, May 7, 2025." Imagine a store receipt that says, "Day of Thor, June 5, 2025." Imagine telling a friend, "July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!"
THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.
We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let's remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!
That would work better if Latin wasn't there before English. Mars Victor!
My goodness, some of the comments in here must come from people who thought that those writing the standard were morons who did no research.
I don’t think they’re morons…just slaves to convention and compatibility. Not many ways to get away from that and justify it.
The sane way of dealing with it is to use UTC everywhere internally and push local time and local formatting up to the user facing bits. And if you move time around as a string (e.g. JSON) then use ISO 8601 since most languages have time / cron APIs that can process it. Often doesn't happen that way though...
Generally yes, that's the way to do it, but there are plenty of times where you need to recreate the time zone something was created for, which means additionally storing the time zone information.
Definitely. If your servers aren't using UTC, then when you're trying to sync data between different timezones, you're making it harder for yourself.
This is what I try to do in the few apps I've written that had to deal with dates and times
The BEST way is to use the number of seconds after the J2000 epoch (The Gregorian date January 1, 2000, at 12:00 Terrestrial Time)
ISO 8601 goes from 1582 (Julian calendar adoption) but can go even further with agreement about intention and goes down beyond the millisecond. Not sure why I want an integer from the year 2000 which only represents seconds.
Simplicity and precision.
Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.
Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.
It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.
I think you skipped part of the sentence.
The clue was in "user facing bits". UTC represents time as an absolute. If you want to show local time, or deal with daylight savings you run UTC through a function on its way to the user.
Where I live, "DD. MM. YYYY" is the standard but some old tombstones use
Do you know why one would ever do that? 20(02/05)25 feels like the "Don't Dead Open Inside" of dates.
That's just a layout. Let's not confuse presentation with content.
Is that the same guy who wrote Standards? tsk, tsk.
2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
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...
https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
It's the only way.
There is still confusion to be had before 1582-11-29
This is the way.
RFC-3336
I figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the "official" format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there's no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y'all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I'm playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
I'm partial to the IFC.
I'm more into the FRC.
If it isn't carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don't want to read about it.
That's where I started. I wanted a little project to try V on, and had come across the IFC, so I wrote a thing. While I was doing that, I got to thinking about the deficiencies and inherited complexities in IFC, and thought up Saturnalia.
If you pop up to my profile in Sourcehut, you'll find a similar program - just a lot longer and more complex, for IFC.
I don't know if they makes me a genius, but yes. Yes it does.
Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib's day) with a name but no numerical date.
I'm a pope, but then, we're all popes.
My problem with Discordianism is that it's all 5s, when 6 is clearly superior, and 12 trumps them all.
Hail Eris.
Hey, I quite like this! You're the first person I've found that's thought of fixing the calendar by adopting six-day weeks. I have a very similar personal version, with two main differences:
I also came to the same conclusion about workweeks. With two-day weekends, the Gregorian calendar has 71 % of workdays but the new calendar only has 67 %. On a thirty-day month this means 20 workdays instead of 21,5. Having the six-day week could also theoretically allow for a move to three- or two-day weeks in a post-scarcity future and doing away with weekends, as well has having either 50 % or 67 % of the workforce being active every day of the week, and not the wild levels of fluctuation seen today. Not having 100 % commuting some days of the week and a fraction of that on others would allow to scale things like transport infrastructure much more effectively
How does that work, with the leap week? Doesn't the year drift out of alignment with the solar cycle?
Only in eight year chunks. By year seven there is more unalignment than there was in year one, but it goes back to normal on year eight. Same thing as with leap days, just a slightly bigger scale.
In fact, with current rules, the shift in the regular Gregorian calendar becomes quite big when considering 100-year and 400-year cycles. In theory, a leap week calendar with new and updated rules could have a very comparable if not a smaller average deviation from the true solar date, though I haven't ran the precise calculations
Ok, so, first, let me say that while I'm enthusiastic about the concept, I understand it's entirely theoretical. We can't even get US civilians to adopt metric, FFS. Just a caveat, lest anyone wander by and overhear us.
That said, I did spend some cycles trying to see it it would be possibly to line up a lunar and solar calendar, and it's not. And it isn't nearly as important as it used to be. It would still have been nice.
So if you do run calculations, I'd like to see them.
Here they are! Orange represents my Leapweek calendar and blue is Gregorian. The Y-axis is deviation from the tropical year and the X-axis is the year number. It's a 19200-year cycle to allow for both Gregorian and Leapweek to do entire iterations of their 400-year and 768-year cycles, respectively.
The Gregorian rules are, as you already know: if a year is divisible by 4, it is a leap year; unless it is divisible by 100, when it is a common year; unless it is also divisible by 400, in which case it is actually a leap year.
My Leapweek rules are: years divisible by 8, are leap (short, with 360 days instead of the usual 366) years, as are years divisible by 768 (after subtracting 4 so as not to clash with years divisible by 8). Just two rules as opposed to Gregorian's three, but they result in almost perfect correction: it takes 625 000 years to fall out of sync by 1 day, as opposed to Gregorian's 3 216 years for the same amount)
The catch is that Leapweek falls out of sync by up to 5½ days either way in between 768-year cycles, and up to 2½ days either way in between 8-year cycles. But they average out.
About the lunisolar I'm afraid to say that I ran into the same issue. Lunations are a very inconvenient duration to try and fit into neat solar days and months.
I wish it weren't as theoretical, because I really like this calendar, but yea. It's one of those things that will be impossible to change even though there's arguably better options. It's too arbitrary yet too essential and it goes in the same box as the metric second/minute/hour, the dozenal system and the Holocene calendar.
Here's a challenge though: try and devise a Martian calendar! That one is not standardised yet. I had good fun trying to match the Martian sol and year to metric units of time and maybe giving some serious use to the kilosecond, megasecond and gigasecond
As an extra, here's a 1000-year version of the graph at the start of the reply, with the current year 12 025 of the Holocene calendar :^) in the middle
This is fantastic. I'm going to have to spend more time with it.
Since we're discussing timescales over which there's a not insignificant chance something radical will happen to society, there's also the fact that the day is getting longer by 2ms every hundred years. If you're scheduling out 625,000 years, that's 12-some seconds by the end, compounded - 6 extra seconds every day by the 312,000th year, etc.
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
I prefer 13 Feb 27
That's not very onionized of you
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.).
I was introduced to ISO 8601 in the US military. Yay standardization!
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.
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.
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
"Moronic" before and now "stupid". Folks are very passionate about their date formats.
Possibly just the matter of logic.
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.
This guide may come handy:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36440098
So, are you a USian?
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.
2013-02-27 = 1984
Issue: there are 27 different ways of writing a date.
Engineers: We most make a common standard that is unambiguous, easy to understand and can replace all of these.
Issue: there are 28 different ways of writing a date.
Joke aside, I really think the iso standard for dates is the superior one!
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:
So xkcd got a detail wrong? I'm cancelling my subscription!
It is. Photos and code merges use it.
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.
The dashes make it far easier for regular humans.
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 recommends inserting a
Tbetween the calendar date portion and the time of day portion. So:20250501T2210+00.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
I agree with the ISO approach, but unfortunately without mainstream adoption in a majority of countries it's just another standard.
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
Upset we didn't get a "Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago..."
This is the way.
I work at a global company an in my team there are people from 5 continents. we use 27-Feb-23. It's the only way nobody gets confused and it's only 1 char more. (Tbf nobody would be confused only my boss that is american lol)
Is that February 27th 2023 or February 23rd 2027?
guys its Dd Mmm Yy, like any sane non american person
Are you planning stuff 2 years ahead already?
I would still be confused by this..
Only if you're american.
I am not. Swede.
You can even save a character by using NATO dates (leaving out the useless hyphens): 01DEC1953
thats not bad! I'll introduce this option
That format near the cat's tail should have used hue to differentiate year/month/day...
In the last company I work for, the department was created from zero, and my boss just let me take all the technical decisions so from the begging everything was wrote in ISO-8601. When I left it was just the way it was, if you try to use any other date format anywhere something is going to give you an error.
10:13 PM on February 27th, but how do you write the year?
10:13 would be 2213 ?
I'm a fool
So, assuming you got the time wrong and meant you could confuse year and time of day, ISO also puts time after date.
2025-05-01T18:18:03Z
Which makes sense. Higher unit to lower unit.
10:13pm or 8:13pm? I can see how this is confusing… perhaps another cartoon with more guidance might be needed.
Personally I like date time groups: 272013 Feb 2013
Disregard ISO8601. Acquire RFC3339. You can leave off the T if you want to, or replace Z with
+00:00.https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
with ISO 8601:
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/10487289
Acquiring the document (legally) to ensure compliance for ISO 8601 is relatively expensive for a single person (~$200 USD), while RFC 3339 is accessible for free.
As a Hungarian, I approve.
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!
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
Ohh, dashes.
Nothing irritates me more than the "01-May-25", "DD-Mon-YY" i.e. the way Oracle databases format dates by default.
Oh? It's my favorite. Almost no ambiguity at all.
From my reading, it's quite ambiguous. It could be 2025-05-01 or 2001-05-25.
DB2 has been using ISO dates by default for decades.
Everyone should use date-time groups so we're all on the same page down to the second.
DDHHMMSSZmmmYY
%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ
@[email protected] this might be applicable to the farside as well
Do you mean the post titles? I've been using the same format as was used since before I took over posting, but if people want ISO format that works for me
I'm all for ISO format. I can't imagine anyone having objections.
Posting in ISO format now, we'll see if there's any objections
Stupid smarch 2nd
No hablo inglés y no sé cuál es "february". How about that? Only Arabic numbes survive internationally.
Sounds like something a terrorist would say.
I see he paid the Internet Cat Tax
I was going to comain until I realized that the fprmat is the one that I prefer.
I’m not a computer and this isn’t work so I’m gonna just use my confusing date format.
I'm working in an international company with colleagues around the world. To avoid confusion, I switched to using this format:
27-FEB-2013
I deal with a lot of old records and boy I really prefer iso when you have to look at a lot of dates and things are in all different years, it's helpful. Have you tried ISO? I also do a lot of international work and haven't heard complaints about it being confusing.
I honestly prefer ISO, but as soon as a US colleague is involved, things get messy. That's my experience from the last 10 years or so.
I just don't like to be forced to include the damn year everytime, and if you cut the year from ISO 8601 you get the american MM-DD order, which everybody hates.
I like DD/MM/YYYY. 🤷🏻♂️
If it's just in casual conversation or emails DD/MM/YYYY is fine, but if you're naming documents or something in a professional setting, you should really always include the year anyway.
This format can fuck off. I prefer the unambiguous format 2FEB2013.
Checkmate, date snobs.
And yes, nations are free to use their appropriate abbreviations for the months.
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.
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?
27.2.2013 is fine for handwriting on paper
For your example, maybe. If someone writes 8/3/2012, you don't know which is month/day. And if they shorten it to 08/03/12 you literally can't even conclusively determine the year, much less the month or day...
depends very much on where you are
You do. 8th of Feb in the entire civilised world and possibly 3rd of something in Trumpistan.
March
Which month is 27?
The one after the 26th.
Smarch2: Electric Boogaloo
That's what we Europeans call a "petty answer to the disgrace that is Amarican military time" (not the be confused with regular Amarican time and dates, which don't allow overflow, as far as I'm aware). The date described above is clearly "the second of March, 2015" or 2015-03-02.
As long as the month comes before the day I can get behind it.
This standard would have probably caught on if they wouldn't have gone and made it backwards.
Objectively you are more likely to need to know the day first, then the month then the year, and when people get lazy they always just leave off the year because it is assumed, but if the year is first you have to say the whole thing or sound stupid.
Yeah that's more human-readable, but not easily sortable.
Depends on the purpose. For documents (especially those on which people work collaboratively over long periods of time) I find YYYY-MM-DD ideal. It spares the issues around day or month first when Europeans and people from the US work together, the document are easy to sort and, if it takes more than a year to complete the project (as is often the case in research) things don't get messy.
Run a business? Infuriate and baffle your accountants by insisting to do all business and keep all records according to a lunar calendar.
In daily speech you're correct, but the ISO standard isn't meant for daily speech. It's meant for timestamps and archives that can be queried in a systematic manner. In that case, the natural ordering is to narrow down the search by year-month-day.
Fk it DD/MM/YYYY Makes much more sense
You normally use dates to keep track of a series of stuff for future reference. We read left to right.
Do you want to read 01 or 2013 first? Do you care about the day and month if it's from 13 years ago?
Relevance is made much more apparent in my opinion.
Why would I gaf about years? Most of the time I do t even use years for anything and yes I prefer to read day first, month second, year isn’t even necessary depending of the situation
How do you write the number thirteen? 13 or 31? 🤔
How stupid can you be? What you said is very stupid but I’m sure you can do even more stupid
If you write thirteen with the big part first (13), why write dates with the small part first?
5/1/2025. I'll die on this hill.
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'll call the coroner.
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...
I'll see you in hell.
Fifth January 2025?
The 5th January 2025, correct.