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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

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Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#371

Post by EdwardDiego »

rswail wrote: post #242
bhaak wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This came up in a r/AskEurope thread and at least some slavic countries use decimeters. But that's the beauty about easily convertable units. Even if other people use other conventions, the mental process to convert them is almost zero. Just imagine somebody giving their height just in inches instead of the usual feet and inches? Could you mentally parse what 76 inches are? I guess you have basically no problem with…

English/Australian people used to (still do?) measure their weight in stones and pounds. The average man was "13 stone" which is 182 pounds. US people measure their weight in pounds, 182lb So yes, a USian telling their weight to a UKian would be like saying their height in inches.

Kiwi here, we generally only use pounds for the weight of a newborn, unsure why.

We also tend to still refer to height informally in feet and inches.

That's about our only remaining usage of imperial units apart from inches in penis size. We refer to a serving of beer between 425mL to 468mL as a pint, but it's only a descriptive term and not a legal measure.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#372

Post by amelius »

inetknght wrote: post #57
jiggawatts wrote: post #6

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's the most obnoxiously American attitude imaginable to ignore this issue because it doesn't affect them... As an American I can fully confirm that 3/11/2011 is obnoxiously ambiguous. It affects us. But most Americans (particularly outside of science / engineering fields) are too thick-headed to recognize the problem or think about ways to improve it. So I do what I can. I don't even ask what time format somethin…

How can you take an international standard seriously when it is based on the number of years since some prophet of some specific religion was thought to be born?

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#373

Post by CivBase »

> If you’re smart enough, you’ve probably also noticed that the American one makes no sense and is just awful

That's simply not true. The American format is designed to reflect how we normally pronounce dates or write them out in long form (eg "September 11th, 2001").

The European format is also flawed. It's similarly divided into three tokens (day, month, year) but they are ordered so that the tokens represent greater magnitudes of time moving from left to right, big-endian-style. The problem is each token is a decimal number which is traditionally written in little-endian-style. So like the American format, you still need special understanding of the format to read dates and they cannot be trivially sorted.

The ISO 8601 format is little-endian all the way through so it is trivially sorted. UNIX time is even easier to sort and compresses much better, but it's rather difficult for humans to read.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#374

Post by mywittyname »

slazaro wrote: post #166
yread wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M/D/Y is a bit like the German way of reading numbers. 328 become three hundred, eight and twenty. Terrible

How about french? 99 is four twenties nineteen, 79 is sixty nineteen. Languages are fun and fascinating.

This explains, to me, at least, the whole "four score and seven years ago" speech. I always wondered the reason behind such a silly way of presenting a number, I just figured it was archaic.

Nope, just French.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#375

Post by itcrowd »

I have recently been inviting my American colleagues to meetings using times-as-American-dates format. In other words, proposing meetings to be on 02/26/21 at 25:23 (This example meaning February 26th 2021 at 25 minutes past 23 hours).

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#376

Post by oxfeed65261 »

amelius wrote: post #372
inetknght wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the most obnoxiously American attitude imaginable to ignore this issue because it doesn't affect them... As an American I can fully confirm that 3/11/2011 is obnoxiously ambiguous. It affects us. But most Americans (particularly outside of science / engineering fields) are too thick-headed to recognize the problem or think about ways to improve it. So I do what I can. I don't even ask what time format somethin…

How can you take an international standard seriously when it is based on the number of years since some prophet of some specific religion was thought to be born?

Can you suggest a better alternative which you would take seriously? A Kelvin-like year based on the approximate date of the Big Bang (as CE/BCE is based on an approximate year)? Logical but unwieldy.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#377

Post by heurisko »

CivBase wrote: post #373

> If you’re smart enough, you’ve probably also noticed that the American one makes no sense and is just awful That's simply not true. The American format is designed to reflect how we normally pronounce dates or write them out in long form (eg "September 11th, 2001"). The European format is also flawed. It's similarly divided into three tokens (day, month, year) but they are ordered so that the tokens represent great…

> The American format is designed to reflect how we normally pronounce dates or write them out in long form (eg "September 11th, 2001").

In the UK at least, we don't write or say dates in that order. With the exception of September 11th.

I believe it's the same in German, 4te Juni etc.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#378

Post by TT3351 »

frn123 wrote: post #353
bombcar wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a representation of how us Americans talk - we rarely say 26th of February and instead say February 26 - and if necessary tack on the year. It feels exceptionally awkward to say 26 February, thought saying “twenty twenty one February 26” sounds very strange, too. But people are very good at verbally saying different than is written.

No native speaker but isn't 4th of July more common than July 4th?

You could even say "The Fourth" and almost all Americans would understand. I think that's why; [begin speculation] it's such an exceptional date it necessitates saying it differently.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#379

Post by davidbanham »

jamie_ca wrote: post #360
davidbanham wrote: post #342

A note from the front line. I actually use 8601 dates in a date-heavy consumer product ( https://clubman.app ) and it’s hands down the feature I most consistently get user feedback on. It’s always “Why are the dates all American format? Can you change them to English?” And then I try to patiently explain that they’re actually international format. People seem to have internalised that any date format they find slight…

Another advantage to outputting 8601 dates is it's easy to mechanically parse - you can probably find some JS to rewrite the 8601 dates coming from the server into whatever the user's current locale is. Bonus points: if your timestamps are UTC, the frontend reformatting can even take timezones into account (such that an American and an Australian could correctly see different dates for the same timestamp).

I did try rewriting dates into a user's locale as specified by the browser. The trouble there is that a lot of people seem to have that set to en-US rather than en-AU. So I still got a bunch of people unhappy that the dates were American!

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#380

Post by TeMPOraL »

exporectomy wrote: post #318
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the complaints are because the format is unfamiliar and strikes non-software people as being non-standard. Perhaps use a format like 3/Nov/2021 ?

Can still be ambiguous because "list." means October in Croatian but November in Czech. Also, "lip." is July in Polish but June in Croatian and "srp." Is July in Croatian but August in Slovak. Maybe it's just Croatian that's ruining it for everyone.

I'm guessing every language ruins something for everyone else.

Around this part of the world, almost everyone calls tea by some variation of the word "chai". But not us. In Polish, it's herbata!

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