I got into the habit of writing dates in this way perhaps 20 years ago, in all my writings. People are sometimes surprised at first but the beauty of this is that they immediately get it. It's self-explanatory, obvious, in a way that no other format is.
ISO 8601: a better date format
61–70 of 437 posts
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#62The real advantage is that Azure and AWS and every other US-centric cloud service insists on showing me that something happened on the 3/11/2021. It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November. Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever. For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date i…
Another example of obnoxious American attitude: the TZ variable in POSIX.
TZ=UTC+8. Is your system now set to the timezone UTC+8? No, it's set to UTC-8. Why? I don't know, but I suspect the people who developed this convention, who lived in the US, just didn't want to type a minus.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#63Coming from China, western date and time formats puzzle me. In China we use the ISO 8601 order for dates. Because of this, and also for all the reasons stated in the article, I use the ISO 8601 format in all my software. As a user, it really bugs me when an app uses either the European or the US format, but doesn't tell me which one it is.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should also start speaking Chinese since it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand. Edit: this is not sarcasm. It’s simple logic, unless there is something wrong with learning other languages.
Sigh... I never remember the names of the logical fallacies, I have to look up them, thanks a lot. Anyways, here's yours: Slippery Slope.
Where’s the logical fallacy? More people natively speak Chinese than any other language in the world. If you want to maximize the exposure of your ideas, it’s only logical to render them in Chinese. It’s the same reason I prefer to distribute applications over the web.
FYI: English has ~1100 million total speakers but only 318 millon native speakers, while Chinese has 918 million native speakers. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-most-spoken-languages/
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's there: > This not only makes all of the dates look equally nice, but also, coupled with other quirks of this format, allows the files with the date in the name to be sorted just by the filename. My issue is with: > Simplified, the core date format looks like this: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss Here are the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 2021-02-26T06:22:59+00:00 2021-02-26T06:22:59Z 20210226T062259Z No…
I loath the T and Z characters, so respectively I use a single dash (Between the date and time) and no Z; for time I often leave in the colons (:). Example: 20210226-00:01:25 this presents the data in a format I can easily visually parse and also easily search for useful things in log files with. When parsing such a date I tend to throw out all of the characters, but the 'Zulu' or timezone at the end probably should…
In other words, you are not using a standard format.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 years ago when most literature was either published recently (newspapers, magazines, etc), or the date of publication was mostly irrelevant (books), your argument makes sense. If you cared at all, what mattered was usually the month and day. For most of the literature people read in the 21st century, especially this past decade, the year is the most important part. People normally couldn't care less whether someth…
I think I need to labor on my point a bit more. There are many use cases for dates. From publication date to planning vacation on a calendar. What is the most common use for a date? Calendar, I guess? The most frequently used dates we encounter are within +/- weeks from now. In a day to day use, YYYY is useless.
A calendar is a great example because they usually emphasize the month, week, and day graphically, not typographically.
Another common remaining example might be a bank statement. But what's interesting there is that the dates are in a column and the year disappears. It hardly matters whether the year comes first or last because you don't actually notice it at all unless the year is rolling over--conspicuous change in that column.
But when I'm looking at something lacking implicit context regarding publication date, such as an online magazine article, a YouTube video, or a Tweet, the year is the first thing I'm searching for. Even on HN, the rule is that the year needs to be included in the title if it wasn't published in the current year.
I guess for e-mail the day and month are most important (similar to bank statements), unless you're reading really old messages. But I use mutt with a default mailbox view that doesn't even show the year.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should also start speaking Chinese since it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand. Edit: this is not sarcasm. It’s simple logic, unless there is something wrong with learning other languages.
This is actually not wrong. China is already very important, and its influence is going to grow. Speaking and understanding Chinese well is a competitive advantage.
I agree. I was applying logic consistently. With 918 million native speakers, Mandarin is the most natively spoken language in the world by at least 2x the runner up.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#68The real advantage is that Azure and AWS and every other US-centric cloud service insists on showing me that something happened on the 3/11/2021. It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November. Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever. For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date i…
> It's the most obnoxiously American attitude imaginable to ignore this issue because it doesn't affect them... only the other 96% of the planet.
I’m not going to comment on the author, though I will acknowledge the abrasive, unhealthy attitude.
Anyway, no. I don’t think there’s a clear “American” standard. Maybe there once was, but I’d just see a pile of numbers these days. It’s hostile to the consumer as it inherently leaves some uncertainty of how it should be consumed.
I will say, and maybe this is American - but I don’t think it is - that I often see dates formatted unambiguously as, e.g. March 11, 2021.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#69While on the subject of time, could you Americans pretty please stop believing that the week starts on Sunday? It's just as wrong as your date format.
Any choice is arbitrary. What is a week to the solar system? The only things that are real are days and years.
International Fixed Calendar is an alternative.
Re: ISO 8601: a better date format
#70[deleted]