What Date Format do YOU use on YOUR website?

[g1smd]

Are you a 07-03-02 or 03-07-02 person, or does 03 July '02 or July 03, '02 do it for you?

Have a look at:

[dmoz.org...]

and

[w3.org...]

before replying.

[edited by: engine at 7:53 pm (utc) on May 11, 2005]
[edit reason] trailing slash added [/edit]

[Purple Martin]

If you include time, include the time zone, as follows:

10:46 PM PDT

As mentioned before, using the 3-letter time zone codes is ambiguous. Can anybody name a city in the EST time zone? Correct answers include New York and Sydney, which are on opposite sides of the planet. While I realise that most of the general public aren't yet familiar with UTC, at least it's unambiguous, and the more we use it the quicker people will get used to it. I only needed to see UTC a couple of times before I felt comfortable with it :)

[rewboss]

It depends on the audience to a large extent. If you're targetting a world-wide audience, you might want to use UTC. If you're targetting a more local audience, using abbreviations might be appropriate. Time zones are tricky, and a surprising number of people find it nearly impossible to grasp the concept. Add the International Date Line into the mix, and many people just give up. There's little you can do about that: it's just that time zones are complicated.

If I'm advertizing local events, I might put a note on the page "All times in Central European Time", or "All times in local time", since even if you're travelling to the event from a different time zone, you would set your watch to local time anyhow.

Be careful with Usability Standards, and bear in mind that the ones quoted above apply to English language websites. Many non-English speaking countries in Europe use the 24-hour clock, so times on a German website (for example) should always be in 24-hour format.

[gcross]

Using one time zone for sites throughout the world is an excellent idea. My question is, since I don't have the time to read six pages to find that info, what does UTC stand for? Is this the same as GMT?

[g1smd]

UTC is Universal Time, Coordinated and comes from 'Atomic Clocks', and is one of a series of UT time-scales. For the layman it is equivalent to GMT. The term GMT was made obsolete in 1971.

Note that the old GMT (now UTC) is used in Britain only in the Winter, in summer BST (one hour ahead) is used on clocks.

A search on Google (or other major search engine) will find hundreds of places with more info.

For Time Zones, nothing can really beat an indication like -0500 or +0900 for clarity.

> The usability standards recommend the following format:
> July 17, 2002

Hmm, Month-Day-Year, sounds like an American recommendation, Europeans would have recommended Day-Month-Year:

17 July 2002 which does away with the comma.

[pageoneresults]

I'll tell you what, there are some real strong points being made from all parties. I'm about ready to make some slight modifications to my date and time stamps and have learned way too much about time since this thread started.

g1smd, you sure know how to come back with a very convincing reply to all the rebuttals. I like these kinds of threads. Good solid discussions centered around appealing to a global audience.

[g1smd]

In another thread on webmasterworld.com someone said:

> Just added the URI and hadn't even had a chance to view in Opera when I saw a problem in Moz. I'm using...

> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530

Looks like a software release date in the last eight characters of the last line above.

[pageoneresults]

> Looks like a software release date in the last eight characters of the last line above.

Good catch! I saw that but didn't think too much of it now that I'm a convert.

My WebTrendsLive stats also gives me three date options...

1. MM/DD/YYYY
2. DD/MM/YYYY
3. YYYY/MM/DD

Of course I'm using option #3. ;)

[gcross]

Ok, for clarification on my generalizations, here's the verbatim wording of the recommendations made by Jakob Nielsen in his book "Website Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed." Under the topic Dates and Times:

105. Show dates and time for time-sensitive information only, such as news items, live chats, stock quotes, and so forth.
106. Show users the time that content was last updated, not the computer-generated current time.
107. Include the time zone you are using whenever you reference a time.
108. Use standard abbreviations, such as p.m. or P.M.
109. Spell out the month or use month abbreviations not numbers.

Secondly...
Quote: "Hmm, Month-Day-Year, sounds like an American recommendation, Europeans would have recommended Day-Month-Year"

Now, excuse me, but my first reaction to that statement was negative. You will be happy to see that I managed to restrain my response to that negativity.

Instead, I re-reviewed my notes and other standards sites. W3C is the primary recognized standard. Their standard can be found here:
[w3.org...]

Following a link to the ISO-8601 standard on dates and times, one finds the following:

"The international standard date notation is

YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the usual Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31."

[cl.cam.ac.uk...]

So, in essence, you and I are Both wrong. And I will yield to the international standard, in the interests of internet usability for all.

[rewboss]

Well, that brings us back to square one. That was the start of the whole argument: I maintain that just because the W3C have decided to use a date format that is unfamiliar to the vast majority of surfers doesn't mean that they're right to do so. The counter argument is that the ISO specs are non-language specific and therefore more accessible to a global audience, even if they have to stop and think for a while.

I prefer to use whichever format is appropriate for my intended audience. Very occasionally, that might be YYYY-MM-DD, but more usually it will vary. However, I always, always spell the month out in full to avoid ambiguity. When I write in English I use the 12-hour clock, when I write in German I use the 24-hour clock. And so on. For me, it's not about adhering to standards which have been arbitrarily applied, it's about making sure my audiences understand me.

[g1smd]

It's not just ISO and W3C supporting YYYY-MM-DD, now the IETF support it:

From the RFC list yesterday. Amongst other things, proposes an ISO 8601 profile for use in future Internet protocols.

A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries.

RFC 3339

Title: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps
Author(s): G. Klyne, C. Newman
Status: Standards Track
Date: July 2002
Mailbox: [e-mail], [e-mail]
Pages: 18
Characters: 35064
Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso: None

I-D Tag: draft-ietf-impp-datetime-05.txt

URL: ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3339.txt

This document defines a date and time format for use in Internet protocols that is a profile of the ISO 8601 standard for representation of dates and times using the Gregorian calendar.

This document is a product of the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Working Group of the IETF.

This is now a Proposed Standard Protocol.

This work was originally proposed way back in 1997 and Chris Newman has put a lot of effort into this, with many refinements along the way. Looks like YYYY-MM-DD is here to stay. RFC 3339.

Yes I *KNOW* it is an RFC for *Protocols* but yet another example of high-level adoption.

[rewboss]

You know, this is slightly getting on my nerves. As you yourself point out, this is for protocols -- machine-readable stuff.

It really is silly. Technicians use a certain date format for certain things and you draw the conclusion from that that soon we'll all be using this format?

Using that logic, we should all be putting NaCl on our food.