this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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ISO8601

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Community dedicated to the international standard YYYY-MM-DD date format.

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Because he didn't know about ISO8601. The only correct date format, especially in Canada.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"What. No it’s month first,” responded his girlfriend Christine. The couple subsequently got in a huge fight and broke up, meaning their relationship only lasted from 10/01/2023-05/03/2024, with neither knowing if that is 6 months or over a year.

What a good line 😂

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

The Beaverton is great.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

, with neither knowing if that is 6 months or over a year.

I mean, that's the kind of ambiguity that makes exes hot, right?

...right?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I didn't know it was called ISO8601 but I started naturally using it at work. It removes confusion among international colleagues, makes it way easier to sort data, and is also good for version control of docs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Me too. It looks quite normal now and, yes, is great for file organisation.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

YYYY-MM-DD crew checking in

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Wait, is that the thirteenth of October, or Smarch 10th?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Oh, lousy Smarch weather!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

ISO8601 is great and all, but even without a common standard, I feel it should either be largest to smallest unit, or smallest to largest. YMD or DMY. Anything else is just asking for misunderstandings.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

YMD is the way to go, because it auto-sorts on a computer.

Even when you tuck on the time, or would you prefer 59:46:13-14:10:2024 :-) ?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are computers the most important thing?

Usually when I read a date I hardly care about year, because most events I read about are within a year

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system and for what purpose, under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system

I'm choosing one for humans, that'd seem to be the group that uses date systems most. Picking a new datesystem for each purpose would be insane, but also exactly what's happening in computer systems.

under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.

I fail to see that conclusion? Why would that be the most logical?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

So the first point was that depending on your files/archives and how you access it, year or month or day may be more relevant to the user, which is why I was saying it's dependent on the user, so I don't agree that a human centric solution is always going to say the year is less relevant.

And then if we are going to prioritize organizing the numbers in such a way as to save the eyes a millisecond of time, for standard usage month would be the orienting date since you need to make sure you are looking at today's month, and then day would be the next necessary date, and then you'd still need the year there, so you'd end up with Month Day Year. Putting Day first would be just as wrong as putting year first because it is irrelevant until you establish the month, it's too granular.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not disagreeing in general, but I need to point out that this is like saying you should write Arabic numerals in order of decreasing powers of 10 because it autosorts on a computer.

It's the reverse. Computers automatically sort Arabic numerals and dates written in decreasing powers because those are the correct formats.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well that throws out DD-MM-YYYY because it's second smallest, smallest, fourth smallest, third smallest....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Heh... not what I meant, but technically correct

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ISO-8601 is the only true time format. Big-endian all the way, baby!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I also only use data formats that can be alphabetized.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My favourite is when you’re reading documentation for an API or an SDK or whatever and the examples show things like “2024-05-05” as the date where they’re both the same number and you can’t discern it at all. Like, use Halloween or Christmas or something as the date so it’s always obvious, eh?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

9th of July 2005?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Unironically a major consideration for me if I was scheduling a C-section.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The rest of the world's date system is most certainly not DD-MM-YYYY.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Care to elaborate? In my part of the world it absolutely is, with only some confusion sometimes caused by American dates

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Large parts of asia (and prob some elsewhere) use YYYY/MM/DD