g1smd - 2:26 pm on Jul 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

Most XML Schemas already only allow ISO 8601 dates, so when the Web is predominently XML rather than HTML, the ISO format will be the default anyway.

I hear what you say about 1999-01-24, however several of those Indexes are for images galleries sorted by date in Year-Month-Day order.

Now try another date like 2001-04-07 [google.com...] .

You'll see several document titles with that date in them, and many documents using the ISO format internally (There are also a few mix ups where it is grabbing some digits from a time).

However, 2000-04-07 gives even more hits [google.com...] .

> I can't see myself ever doing a search for a date in ISO8601.

In real life, you would probably combine the date with other search words.

Try [google.com...] for example.

NewsML, the XML Schema format for the distribution of news (by Reuters and such) is based on ISO 8601 .

Repositiories for news (not Usenet Newsgroups) are therefore already using this format.

However (correction), I just checked the Date Format used by [groups.google.com...] (formerly [dejanews.com...] ) the Web-based archive of UseNet, and they are already using YYYY-MM-DD throughout the MESSAGE HEADERS on the searchable archive. They use long format 22 June 2002 elsewhere.