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04/03/02 in UK = fourth of march 2002
04/03/02 in US = third of april 2002
if the month is in full then the rest will fall into place...
That isn't neccesarily the case. Take the date format widely used in the travel/reservations industry:
Is that earlier this year, or early next year?
Normally, in context, you can tell. And it was much more obvious when you saw dates like 02JAN99. But, however the month is rendered, there is a strong case for not abbreviating years to two digits.
I hope people here take the time to follow up the 4 links I provided in earler postings.
Is there anyone else here convinced enough to make the change ? (Thanks moonbiter, ergophobe, victor, PurpleMartin, and pageone for your earlier support !)
W3C have a note about ISO 8601 on their web-site, and many new protocols are now using it.
It is, g1smd, a lot of people read that the other way. In a lot of places outside the U.S. today is 03-07-2002. It's actually logical, since it corresponds with 3Jul02.
You can browse here [search.aol.co.uk] to see it.
In a lot of places outside the U.S. today is 03-07-2002.
I was born and raised in the USA and they didn't teach this stuff in school back in the 70's! Not once did YYYY-MM-DD come into my life, until this thread started. I was in the service for 4 years and lived by the Julian Date.
Hmmm, just did a quick search on julian date and found this...
> Calendar dates — year, month, and day — are more problematic. Various calendar systems have been in use at different times and places around the world. This application deals with only two: the Gregorian calendar, now used universally for civil purposes, and the Julian calendar, its predecessor in the western world. As used here, the two calendars have identical month names and number of days in each month, and differ only in the rule for leap years. The Julian calendar has a leap year every fourth year, while the Gregorian calendar has a leap year every fourth year except century years not exactly divisible by 400.
That coming from the U.S. Naval Observatory [aa.usno.navy.mil]. Now what I do? Switch all the dates back? Nah, I'll stick with the recommendations in this thread for now. I've already gotten used to the new format.
P.S. Now that I think about it, the rollover to the 21st Century created a slight problem with date formats. Any dates between **32 and **99 are easily recognizable by their last two digits. Not so with the rollover to 00. Now we have 31 years of confusion to look forward to.
ISO 8601 is for machine readable code. It is designed to be read and understood by machines. It is not designed actually to be displayed. It may be used by scientists, but that's a specialist field.
The vast majority of my visitors do not understand the ISO 8601, and I do not see why I should force them to learn it just because I think it would make life easier.
What's the big deal? You should use ISO 8601 in, say, <del> and <ins> tags, which are tags which should be removed before publication anyway.
The full ISO 8601 specification is:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD
where:
YYYY is the year in four-digit format;
MM is the month in two-digit format;
DD is the day in two-digit format;
hh is the hour in two-digit format (military time);
mm is the minute in two-digit format;
ss is the second in two-digit format;
and TZD is the time zone; either Z for UCT or +hh:mm for times ahead of UTC, or -hh:mm for times behind UTC (not all time zones are whole hours away from UTC).
Imagine the latest blockbuster film is showing at the local cinema at:
2002-08-14T19:30:00+02:00
Should they put that on their site?
My db crap though i always do YYYY-MM-DD
So where exactly do we draw the line between dates displayed on a html or xml web page, or in a document, for reading; and those read by a machine which crawls those pages and indexes them for a search engine?
> 2002-08-14T19:30:00+02:00
> Should they put that on their site?
They should use the 2002-08-14 date format, and the use of 24-hour time does now seem to start happening in the US - Europeans have been happy with it for decades - but there is no need for the T in human reading. Indication of time zone is useful, however old style EST could be Eastern Standard Time US, European Summer Time, or Eastern Standard Time Australia. The use of -0200 type formats is already well established in things like email headers designed to be read by both machines and humans. However, the date format in email headers was defined before ISO 8601 was well known. Date stamps inside MPEG movies are always ISO8601 format. It's surprising just where it is used... already more places than you could imagine.
And you can't have your cake and eat it. You either use the ISO 8601 standard or you don't -- you certainly shouldn't use part of it.
You're asking me to tell visitors to my site that they have to learn a new format for reading dates, one which the vast majority of them are unfamiliar with and which nobody uses in the normal course of their everyday lives. That is bad design, period. It is tantamount to saying, "If you don't do things the way I say you must, bad luck, because my SE rankings are more important to me than your being able to understand what I write."
SE rankings mean nothing if your content is illegible. We have to give people information they can actually use, not force them to learn our way of doing it. All you need to do is to write the month out in full and the year in four digits, and it will be understood far more quickly by far more people. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? A web page should be human readable. (The HTML code itself, of course, can be as machine-readable as you like, but not the result.)
It is now (using the condensed format) 200207091852+02, or thereabouts.
Of course, that's according to the Gregorian calendar, which not all cultures use. Perhaps the next step is a standard which incorporates the Jewish and Islamic calendars?
I was born and raised in the USA and they didn't teach this stuff in school back in the 70's! Not once did YYYY-MM- DD come into my life, until this thread started.
I could say the same to first part, but this date format is something I came up with on my own (I'm not saying I was the first, just that I never read about it anywhere before I started using it). Why? Simple, I keep archived backups of the projects I work on. The only way on most computers to get a file listing to sort by name is alphabetical. If you name your archive files
project-03-jan-2002
Then your backups are in order all right, but the order is
April
August
December
February
January
July
June
Etc
With the naming system that g1smd proposes, you archive your files with names like
2002-03-29_project1
2002-04-30_project2
Sorts alphabetically and numerically.
I still use other date formats when it is text intended to be read by a human in a given language and context. So when I write in French it is always 3 fevrier 2002 and in English, I spell the month out and use a four digit year so there is no ambiguity.
Whenever I think that I can get away with "computerese", though, I prefer the yyyy-mm-dd format because
1. it's unambiguous
2. it works as an alphabetic or numeric sort
and now I can add
3. it's an ISO standard.
Thanks so much for bringing this latter point to my attention!
Cheers,
Tom
Search for 'military' in the page at this link: [byte.com...] . Times have moved on.
This is useful: [naggum.no...] check out the date it was written as well.
also [wm.edu...] maybe?
> The vast majority of my visitors do not understand the ISO 8601, and I do not see why I should force them to learn it just because I think it would make life easier.
Where-ever you are in the world, about 99% of potential visitors to your web site are outside of your country. The idea of ISO 8601 is to be language neutral, simple, relatively obvious, and not easy to confuse with any other format already in use in some place.
Language neutral means 'all digits'. Not confused with any other format therefore rules out 01-02-03 and 01-02-2003 . 01-2003-02 is preposterous. This leaves 2003-02-01, which as I said upstairs:
> ... that the only language-neutral, unambiguous (_once_you_have_learnt_one_simple_rule_), globally-agreed standard is YYYY-MM-DD.
That simple rule: Only YYYY-MM-DD is valid, yyyy-dd-mm is NOT valid; as opposed to looking at a date like 01-02-2003 and understanding what is meant.
In fact, your interpretation of 01-02-2003 depends on...
-Whether you yourself are European or American.
- Whether you are sure you know...
- - That the date was written by a European or by an American.
- - That the information originated either from Europe or from America.
- - That the information was targeted at a European or American readership.
- - That you actually knew that two different methods were in use on the opposite sides of the Atlantic.
- - ...or any combination of the above.
In other words you have absolutely no idea if you read it right or not.
BTW: ISO 8601 is also known as ANSI X3.30 and NIST FIPS 4-1 .
The year 2000 caused a problem in our perception of date formats.
I utilize a web based application for tracking and just realized it uses the 2002/07/09 format. Its funny how I've been actively looking at date and time formats when visiting websites. ;)
