As someone from a yyyy-mm-dd country, you’re all wrong /hj
yyyy-mm-dd is specified by ISO 8601, so there’s really no argument it isn’t the objectively correct format.
There’s also RFC3339, which is freely available and compatible with the most common ISO8501 profile.
I always use yyyy.mm.dd as my date format whenever I sign and date documents. I also use a pictograph instead of initials. Someone tried to forge a contract edit to try and get out of paying but used the mm/dd/yy format. The moment my lawyer showed this to their lawyer, they settled immediately for the original amount, legal fees, and late payment penalties. Dumbasses.
That’s beautiful. I love a bit of personal standards to fuck someone else’s day up.
I typically change my responses on the form to Calibri if using MS Office. It’s not enough to pique anyone’s interest, but it’s different enough to spot what I’ve added to a form rather than the usual Arial additions if you’ve been told about it.
Someone at my office tried to say I’d said something on a form when I hadn’t, and took great delight pointing out the slight difference in typeface on the field that wasn’t my edit.
It’s satisfying as fuck coming back at someone with receipts.
So I could use a different than usual date format for a document I might want to recall
The situation was more like “Dear lawyer, your clients have committed a federal felony offense and they did it in such a sloppy manner that they didn’t even follow our standard document formatting. Drop the suit, have them pay our legal fees and a fine, and we won’t inform the US District Attorney and then ask the State Bar of Texas to look into whether you knowingly partook in this scheme”.
I’m glad I’m near retirement. These sort of situations chip away at the soul.
Lithuania if you want the serious answer :3… china, japan, both koreas, taiwan, bhutan, mongolia and hungary also use it
But yes, im from linuxstan :3
How is it living in a theocracy worshipping our lord and savior Richard Stallman?
Why can’t Trump use unitary executive theory to do something good…like force everyone to use ISO 8601.
Both are wrong. The correct way to write the date is YYYY-MM-DD. This is the only way to sort dates linearly in a list. ISO 8601.
♥️ this is what I decide to use at work. Dots are superior than dashes in my opinion because they prevent line breaks
I like dashes because they work better than dots or slashes for file names.
In Arabic we use DD/MM/YYYY but it actually gets written as YYYY/MM/DD since Arabic is written and read from right to left. When the year is dropped the confusing part is not what format is used here but rather does this website/software support RTL or is it just regular unformatted ASCII.
Edit: it’s still not ISO 8601 and it doesn’t solve the sorting issue
Should work if you have an RTL invert character before, right? (Not that you could name files with the slashes.)
RTL invert characters are just for rendering purposes it doesn’t help with sorting also in older systems sometimes it was not supported.
And, when the context of the year is understood, you can just drop it. At least Japanese does this (and I’m pretty sure Chinese does as well).
You shouldn’t do that, because if you’re writing it down it means you want to either refer to it later or have someone else refer to it later. The year changes and you’re searching for that receipt or email… why set yourself up for failure?
BRB – I have to tell the country of Japan they’re doing dates wrong /s.
For the things I’m thinking about, the year generally doesn’t matter. I’m thinking advertisements or even things that say like ‘Spring 2025 menu 2025年の春メヌー’ or something which preserves context. A lot are also written on shop whiteboards and such which are changed fairly regularly. In my own notes, in anything I may care about that far into the future, I do write the full date in ISO-8601
So you’ve never in your entire life written down a date dropping the year? No matter the context of the note? Even a shopping list? Even a party next weekend? That’s a dedication to…archival science? that I’ve never seen before
Why is the format not:
2025/4/12
Biggest time frame to smallest time frame (year, month, then day)?
As a computer scientist, I’ve been doing this everywhere for over 10 years already. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I worked for a company that did their dates multiple ways and it was fucking impossible to know what date was what. It was super frustrating. I’d prefer this, but if you don’t, at least keep it consistent once you start.
If a date starts with the year, everyone will know the thing after it is the month. I’ve never ever seen YYYY/DD/MM. That, to me, seems like it wouldn’t add additional confusion at least.
In my computer engineering course this is literally how we were told to write the date on our lab reports.
Because humans are not computers. That scheme makes sense when you are filling out things that are not nearby in time. For example, filling in your birth date on tax forms.
Otherwise, humans don’t generally need the context of the year. The same is true of the month only if the context is clear (I’ll see you on the 20th implies the very next 20th). A year is much longer and most things are not planned out that far in advance. If they are, they often dont have precise dates in which case a month or even a quarter is more appropriate.
Time is also one of those things where humans are so used to contextual processing that representing the full date adds overhead. 2025/4/20, 4/20/2025, 20/4/2025 all take more processing than “the 20th” or “next Sunday”.
Coldest take: if any common date format is difficult for you, you’re a little bit ridiculous
It’s all fun and games until someone drops a 7/4 and you don’t know which country they’re from
I usually go for if it has a / its probably US date formate…
We use dots in our Locale
MM/DD/YYYY genuinely causes issues, because it’s very easily misread by the rest of the world, and vise versa for Americans.
I have been mislead more than once, because the MM and DD are both ≤ 12.
MM/DD/YYYY needs to die
Month Day YYYY is fine, because it’s unambiguous when the month is spelled out.
YYYY.MM.DD, or similar, is the only way to sort dates properly anyway.
What Americans are calling people idiots for saying (day) of (month)? We say it both ways all the time. 4th of July, July 4th… it’s not a complicated thing.
That is a weird one: every other date is “normal” order but for some reason this is an exception. Also weird that we call it with backward date more often than its actual holiday name
- July 4 is a normal date
- Independency Day is the name of the holiday
- so why do we usually refer to it as “Fourth of July”
