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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

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Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#321

Post by bonzini »

Markoff wrote: post #250
tpetry wrote: 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.

that's reason I switched to ISO 8601 in my folders structure decades ago, obviously can't use it in regular documents/communication in Europe there used to be similar problem with alphabet (folder) sorting though, where Windows used to sort letter CH which goes after H in alphabet right within C as if CH didn't exist, but I think they sorted it in recent years, though I use English Windows and still have this issue,…

English Windows applies English sorting rules, whereby CH is not a separate letter. It is not easy at all, different languages have different rules, including multiple passes over the input (e.g. the first for letters and the second for accents), even some of them left-to-right and some right-to-left.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#322

Post by trinix912 »

jacobolus wrote: post #49
vbezhenar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The built-in apps seem to handle it pretty well (ex. the dictionary app has ⌘Ä / ⌘Ö shortcuts when set to Swedish). 3rd party apps often don't care and it gets worse the more you move away from plain QWERTY.

Although macOS is good in the aspect that combinations akin to AltGr on PCs aren't unique to non-US layouts. I've seen programmers assume it's safe to assign shortcuts to Ctrl-Alt (which simulates AltGr), making it impossible to enter certain characters. Not surprising, as it's not used on the US layout (just as there's no extra key next to the left Shift).

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#323

Post by eCa »

Markoff wrote: post #250
tpetry wrote: 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.

that's reason I switched to ISO 8601 in my folders structure decades ago, obviously can't use it in regular documents/communication in Europe there used to be similar problem with alphabet (folder) sorting though, where Windows used to sort letter CH which goes after H in alphabet right within C as if CH didn't exist, but I think they sorted it in recent years, though I use English Windows and still have this issue,…

> obviously can't use it in regular documents/communication in Europe

What I do when travelling in Europe[1] is to un-ambuigify the date by replacing the month number with the English month abbreviation: 2021-feb-26. It's non-standard but can't reasonably be misunderstood by a human.

[1] I'm from a European country where the ISO 8601 way of writing dates is common, and more specifically neither the American nor "European" formats are ever used.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#324

Post by [deleted] »

JdeBP wrote: post #320
systemvoltage wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point noted. We weren't so globally connected just 20 years ago, so if you were in US, you were used to MM/DD format and if you were anywhere else, you were used to DD/MM format. It was all local.

Nonsense. People have been commenting on how these two orderings are confusing for far longer than 20 years. Things made in the United States have had worldwide circulation for quite a while, now. Even if one has WWW tunnel vision, Markus Kuhn's WWW page on ISO 8601 has been around since 1995.

[deleted]

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#325

Post by trinix912 »

misterS wrote: post #108
jacobolus wrote: post #49

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.

I use the Canadian English layout on macOS for most of the time, if I need to enter accented letters, I can just hold down a normal letter (A) then select an accented one from the popup (Å). The international English layout works the same way if I remember correctly.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#326

Post by notatoad »

athorax wrote: post #281
AlanYx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "week date" format (yyyy-www-d) in ISO8601 is IMHO why it's usually better to refer to RFC3339, which doesn't allow the week date format. So many people are unaware that the ISO8601 format allows "week date" and/or don't understand its quirks, and articles like this one, which don't even mention that ISO8601 dates can appear in this format, compound the problem.

It does mention it though, FTA: ...and a calendar where the year is separated not by months but by weeks, which is used in finances, but here we’re only interested in the basics.

i don't think mentioning it in the context of specifically excluding it is going to cause any confusion though.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#327

Post by fermienrico »

JdeBP wrote: post #320
systemvoltage wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point noted. We weren't so globally connected just 20 years ago, so if you were in US, you were used to MM/DD format and if you were anywhere else, you were used to DD/MM format. It was all local.

Nonsense. People have been commenting on how these two orderings are confusing for far longer than 20 years. Things made in the United States have had worldwide circulation for quite a while, now. Even if one has WWW tunnel vision, Markus Kuhn's WWW page on ISO 8601 has been around since 1995.

If you’re living in Berlin, it didn’t matter what US date format was 20 years ago. You’re missing the point that the globe is far more connected due to the internet.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#328

Post by notatoad »

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…

The AWS console is absolutely terrible for this, not just because it disobeys my preferred date format but because it's not even internally consistent. sometimes it converts timestamps to my local timezone, sometimes it displays them in UTC, sometimes it displays them in ISO8601 format, sometimes it displays them in US format.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#329

Post by [deleted] »

richrichardsson wrote: post #128
CyberRabbi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.visualca…

> More people natively speak Chinese than any other language in the world You've made the assumption that all Chinese people speak one language, which is a false assumption I'm afraid [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

[deleted]

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#330

Post by contravariant »

hannob wrote: post #9

There's another aspect you may not know about: It's close to how it's done in chinese, which is 2021年3月17日. They use different separators (the chinese words for year, month and day), but it's close enough. Given that china is the country with the largest population it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand.

It's also neat how the character for month and day are the same as characters for moon and sun respectively.

I suppose that means we could also do the following if we really wanted a western version:

2021⊕317

Edit: Turns out that hackernews isn't quite astrological unicode compliant yet but imagine the astrological symbols for sun and moon in there as well.

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