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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

151–160 of 437 posts

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#151
post #15

The 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…

If it is in the browser it is probably just displaying using you local date time format

[deleted]

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#152
post #17

The article is missing one of the best features of iso 8601: it‘s string form is naturally sortable. You don‘t need any specific logic for sorting, so e.g. your filesystem will automatically sort files correctly if you prefix them with a iso 8601 date.

Also every language has a tag for that format (.toISOString()), where as the other formats might require entering your own printf spell

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#154
post #141
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent, but I do like the space-efficiency in some cases for Chinese/Japanese characters that make them great for status bars and terminal prompts. E.g. a single character to unambiguously denote weekday, window layout (全/広/高), and others. Renders everywhere as long as you have a decent CJK font. Bonus: looks a lot less stupid than emojis. My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single chara…

> My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single character and as long as it's You're a bit cheating there :) It's one character that takes up 2 columns. You could get away with using the first 2 characters from the English names as they are unique. But I know that in English that's unusual but for example in German, the 2 letter abbreviation are the standard ones. You say weekday, but Google…

Maybe a bit cheating - but it's nice with the consistency, and visually it becomes a lot more clear and immediate at least for me.

"金" would be short for "金曜日", a common way to abbreviate weekday names in calendars etc and yes, Friday is indeed the day of gold - I like to imagine it's the old pay day for workers maybe? :D

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#155
post #141
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent, but I do like the space-efficiency in some cases for Chinese/Japanese characters that make them great for status bars and terminal prompts. E.g. a single character to unambiguously denote weekday, window layout (全/広/高), and others. Renders everywhere as long as you have a decent CJK font. Bonus: looks a lot less stupid than emojis. My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single chara…

> My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single character and as long as it's You're a bit cheating there :) It's one character that takes up 2 columns. You could get away with using the first 2 characters from the English names as they are unique. But I know that in English that's unusual but for example in German, the 2 letter abbreviation are the standard ones. You say weekday, but Google…

金 from 金曜日 (Kinyōbi) means Friday. The letter correspond to the planet the weekday was named after, just like in English (金星 is Venus)

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#156

The 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 took many decades to widely adopt UTF-8. I think that one of the reasons was that US companies did not really care about character encodings, as it's not something they have to often deal with. Even today managing multiple keyboard layouts is a pain in most operating systems, it's buggy, it does not have enough configuration options, it's not convenient. Probably because most US developers never tried to use that…

Until people get used to emoji... And not supporting UTF-8 is suddenly a big problem even for English people now.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#157
post #16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we hit year 10000, but yeah, that's still a looong time to go.

There's some proposal that this year 2021 is actually 12021, to make the year neutral of some specific religious event.

Yup. I have a calendar for 12021 hanging in my office, and I very like the sentiment it expresses. I tried to use the Holocene years with other people, but they remain unconvinced.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#158

The 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 took many decades to widely adopt UTF-8. I think that one of the reasons was that US companies did not really care about character encodings, as it's not something they have to often deal with. Even today managing multiple keyboard layouts is a pain in most operating systems, it's buggy, it does not have enough configuration options, it's not convenient. Probably because most US developers never tried to use that…

My wife recently bought by mistake a keyboard whose layout I couldn't figure out. It took me a full 5 minutes to even get to the correct place where I could configure keyboard layouts under Windows 10 settings. Then I had to choose the keyboard layout I wanted to add. This was a list in a dropdown with hundreds of options without an image of what each layout looks like so I could not check which option matched the keyboard in front of me. There was not even an input field where I could test the chosen layout, I had to switch back and forth from the Notepad. After many tries, I finally got it right: Portuguese. Completely by trial and error.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac Firefox and Mac Chrome both break a bunch of keyboard shortcuts if you use a non-US-ANSI keyboard. Safari handles alternate layouts correctly. Just yesterday I learned that on an ISO Spanish keyboard, both of those browsers will pop up a help menu for ⌘⇧7. The logic goes: ⇧7 means / on a Spanish ISO keyboard, and ⇧/ means ? on a US-ANSI keyboard, therefore ⌘⇧7 is by the transitive property of inter-layout shift f…

Stuff like this is the reason why I, as a non-american software engineer, use `US_en` layouts on all my machines.

Same. When I have to use someone else's computer without an US_en keyboard I look like an elder learning to type.
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