Re: [OFFTOPIC] HTML has, probably, confusing date format

David Woolley wrote:
>>"YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD". In this format a month is represented by two
> 
> 
> This is a long standing format defined by the International Standards
> Organisation (ISO), as indicated in the reference.  It's advantages
> are that it sorts correctly when sorted as a simple character string
> (excluding the timezone) and avoids language issues.  I'd expect any

And majority of all people are already using something similar to ISO 
8601 already. For example, ISO 8601 has been official date format in 
China since 1994 and IIRC there're pretty many people in China. And like 
David wrote, ISO 8601 doesn't have language dependency ("Jan"??? First 
month is called "Tammikuu" where I live).

As I see it, this problem is caused by imperial date format because 
logically, the only reasonable choices would be YYYY%MM%DD or DD%MM%YYYY 
(where % is some delimiter).

But still some people insist using YYYY%DD%MM. Could somebody, please, 
explain the logic behind it? Are year and day of month considered more 
important than month itself or why such order?

I'd be fine if ISO 8601 defined date format as DDMMYYYY but that's 
because official format is DD.MM.YYYY where I live. The reasoning for 
this format is that you usually know which month and year is going so 
day is most important information and should come first. The logic 
behind using YYYY-MM-DD is that it's following the same order as time 
hh:mm:ss.sss (big endian).

But really, if we could even get everybody to use 24H notation for time, 
I'd be happy.

"Please consider the 12h time to be a relic from the dark ages when 
Roman numerals were used, the number zero had not yet been invented and 
analog clocks were the only known form of displaying a time. Please 
avoid using it today, especially in technical applications! Even in the 
U.S., the widely respected Chicago Manual of Style now recommends using 
the international standard time notation in publications."

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html#us

-- 
Mikko

Received on Tuesday, 26 November 2002 05:09:05 UTC