Preamble
Many sites and apps use some custom date formats. Even the wordpress app acknowledges my ISO8601 date setting “2019-02-12” but nevertheless displays dates as “Feb 12, 2019”.
And so do many, many other mobile, desktop, and web apps, mostly enforcing the completely illogical and unintuitive imperial date format on a global population of users. Such ignorance of globally agreed international standards shows an unhealthy dose of egotism and ignorance alike.
While the former requires therapy, ignorance, as in lack of knowledge, can be remedied, which we hope this article will contribute towards.
Why ISO Date Format
Oft discussed and oft ignored, here they are again summarized:
- ISO 8601 is the internationally accepted way to represent dates and times.
- Avoiding uncertainty in representing dates can be difficult and individually frustrating.
- Misunderstandings in global communication can be eliminated.
- Eliminate misinterpretation and conversion of dates in business environments that can be very costly.
- Dates can not be confused with other popular notations.
- Avoid applications becoming unusable due to date input quagmires.
- Readability of dates is greatly improved.
- Easy on the programmer (no ‘Jan’, ‘Feb’ table necessary).
- easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison.
- language independent.
- consistency with the common 24h time notation system, where the larger units (hours) are also written in front of the smaller ones (minutes and seconds).
- strings containing a date followed by a time are also easily comparable and sortable (e.g. write “1995-02-04 22:45:00”).
- the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both keyboard data entry and table layout easier.
- identical to the Chinese date notation, so the largest cultural group (>25%) on this planet is already familiar with it :-).
- date notations with the order “year, month, day” are in addition already widely used e.g. in Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and a few other countries and people in the U.S. are already used to at least the “month, day” order.
- a 4-digit year representation avoids overflow problems after 2099-12-31
- You can show-off your global citizenship.
- You become closer to being a global citizen.
- You demonstrate your knowledge and open mindedness.
- Your fraternity with all world! citizens becomes apparent.
- You contribute to intercultural understanding.
- You help the world become united.
Is there still anything stopping you from using ISO 8601, except your habit? Habits can be changed with force of mind. Show you have it in you.
openTeq 
30 years of ISO8601 and the fact you needed to posted this rant just proves how limited its adoption had been. The standard was set pre-internet and yet cultural traditions trumps regulation. It is unfortunate the discussion has been focused on a “do it this way” mentality, rather than goal of being understood. I suspect in another 30 years, a similar post will be made. Meanwhile, there is such a simple adaption.
~
2019-003-04
04.003.2019
003/04/2019
https://twitter.com/1World1Date1Day/status/1102363544954302465
~
yyyy-0MM-dd
dd.0MM.yyyy
0MM/dd/yyyy
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Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your feedback. I guess there are few things as bad and laid back as sticking to some ideologies (I call them local kingdoms, because that way I can be the monarch of my ideology).
The alternative standard you are prposing is fully viable for human readability and machine processing, bare the advantage of natural sorting of date strings mentioned in my article, which is only viable with a top-down hierarchical order, i.e. “2019-03-05”, or “2019-003-05”. The added advantage of the 1W1D1D format is that the meaning is coded into the format (length 4 characters = year, 3 chars = month, 2 chars = day).
At the end it is a question of weighing the objectives and fulfillment criteria to adopt one common standard (on Earth we have the gregorian calendar and UTC to standardize about, but what about dates and date formats when we go into space, must not be far, Mars to Io would suffice to confuse humanity for the next 1575 years about what date/time is meant 😉 ).
But standard it must be for the global/universal citizen!
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Yeah, in those space movies where the traveler does not age, but the earth bound age 10x faster; no one ever gets into the details of how they are tracking the passage of time, “out there”. For now, the earth spins, the moon orbits and we all go round and round. Happy 2019-003-05 !
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