YYYY-MM-DDI proper shit post would have suggested “mm/dd/yyyy”.
The problem is not the format itself, its just sometimes we don’t know which format is used: 07/07/26
ISO 8601 or gtfo
4/Aug/2026
Already saw 1 person write 4/7/26. Writing that 3-4 letters for the month both solves the day/month vs month/day issue, and the off chance someone makes mistake of the month number
Yeah, this is how I do it. Computers are more than capable of handling the three-letter abbreviation for months nowadays, versus some bygone era where perhaps we needed just numbers. This is how I date anything that I need to out a date on.
You’re all too ambiguous!
04-Aug-2026 is the only acceptable format
Oogh. Such rage bait.
That’s a red flag… He has obviously not received the xkcd PSA.
There is for everything a
She seems impressed
We grew up on MM/DD/YYYY but all our computer stuff is YYYY/MM/DD however now that we live in EU we use DD/MM/YYYY and still YYYY/MM/DD for files in pc
FAIL
yyyy-mm-dd
Yep. Doing that joke and landing on anything but ISO-8601 would be a huge red flag for me.
Lithuania, Hungary, Japan represent
Tik gryžtu ir randu Lietuva.
Based
Being able to sort numerically and have it also be in chronological order is sooo cool.
ISO 8601!
Long live the 8601
my beloved
yep… this or dd.mm.yyyy (for texts)
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
But you’ll end up with months instead of minutes!
Please use any kind of separation character or I’m gonna lose my mind
Best I can give you is a single “_”
202609041006_15
Noar
Every fucking time they make him look like a tool.
He formats dates, how else would he look like?
ISO 8601
As for why it’s better:
- It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
- Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
ISO is better for archiving and sorting, inarguably so. But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage, where the day and month are much more important than the year.
Both have their uses, but for different situations. mm-dd-yyyy is just batshit though.
To be fair, the time separators don’t behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.
And unlike most „forbidden characters“ for file names, the colon is actually used in NTFS: to separate the file path from the name of a
named forkAlternate Data Stream.See, I hadn’t even read about this. TIL :)
Still, I use ISO8601 all the time when it comes to written dates :)
YYYY-MM-DD
Open source, and no ambiguous options grandfathered in.
This is the only way to date.
👆
Are a lots of things gonna break in about 8000 years?
No need for dashes
I’ve recently noticed web forms and appointment emails start to use that format. Maybe web devs are sneaking it in bit by bit.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the (year-month-) day.
💯
RFC 3339
ISO would be great, but sadly OmegaStar doesn’t support ISO timestamps yet.
Wtf is an omega star?
The last star of the Greek alphabet? 🤷🏻
A Warrior Cats and Omegaverse crossover character
What’s a warrior cat
Not shit enough for a shitpost.
Except I can’t get behind the time part of it, personally. I can see the point of doing GMT with the offset if you’re working across multiple timezones, but it’s overkill for situations where you aren’t.
There’s no way to predict how a date will be used. No reason not to be flexible. No reason to break convention.
That’s how my brother missed a train: the linux planner used GMT while the local train company planner used assumed local time…
So I disagree
Modern problems.jpg
I think we should all, as a globe, just pick one time zone and use that. I don’t care if my 1:00 pm is the middle of that night. Everyone’s 5:00pm will be 5:00pm. We will learn how to adjust our schedules for the master time zone.
How so, out of curiosity?
If you work at a company where all of its offices are in the same time zone and you’re time-stamping logs, then it’s more expedient for understanding and placing an event in time against other things to use local time.
Unless everything is already standardized as GMT with offset I guess, but I feel like down that route lies madness.
“I got your email at 20:37:45-7:00” is a few more steps than “I got your email at 1:37PM”.
It’s not a big hurdle, but I try to design for the newest member on the team scrambling in panic rather than a calm cool professional already familiar with conventions.
Now, as soon as we do start dealing with multiple time zones I would just cut my custom time formatting string down to the shorthand to have the scripting language output in the full ISO 8601 format. But until then, being able to easily sort the the date properly and having the time be more human readable is a more “workable” compromise.
Seeing how often I get meeting invites for the wrong time because coworkers ignore my 11 a.m. CDT, and invite me in their timezone, I feel like communicating everything in UTC would be easier, because there could be no confusion.
Yeah, the time part should obviously be written in Swatch Internet Time, he writes at @910.
It’s great, and standard for software. But do any of y’all communicate dates like this in your personal life?
Like “want to go to a hockey game with me 2026-10-17?” As cursed as mm-dd-yy is, it feels a lot more natural in conversation.
Say when is that independence day of yours?
There is nothing ‘natural’ about mm/dd/yy, it is just what you are used to - end of story.
I knew I would eat shit for that comment.
July 4th is a funny example cause you can say “the 4th” and everyone knows what you mean, but people also say “4th of July” to give it more importance.
That’s a lot less common for other dates, Americans aren’t commonly saying “25th of December”.
Ok, let me rephrase that: See how 4th of July feels natural for you to say or hear?
That’s because you’re used to it.
That’s how it is for the rest of us using DD-MM-YYYY, but for all dates.
Because that’s what we are used to. And yes we use it in everyday life and in every conversation.
That is all there is to it.
I always feel like rolling my eyes whilst Americans slowly drawl the month at me before telling me the day of the month I wanted
“Dec…”
Oh god, you’re American
“…em…”
Here we go, we’re going for it
“…berrrrr”
Yes, we’re getting there
“…rrrrrrr”
Hopefully we get to the date, or I’m going to have to ask someone else
[inhales]
Why did it have to be an American
“Twenty….”
Please not the year
“…-seventh”
Hallelujah, thank the lord, we have a date. Oh Jesus, why such an ordeal. So much time for stupid intrusive thoughts. What was it again…?
Admittedly like most of this is my failings as a person
What you are used to inevitably becomes more natural for you subjectively…
I absolutely fill out dates in iso 8601 any time I’m required to sign a form.
same. even if they give a different format, because fuck that I’m not thinking about what arbitrary format you want me to use, I see a date field and I’m filling it out with the proper date format
I like your style. I’ll start doing that, (unless a format is specified, because I’m no protocol breaker.)
dd-mm feels completely natural to say in conversation. “Do you want to go to a X with me on the 3rd of August”
But… what YEAR???
Does “August 3rd” sound unnatural to you?
In spoken conversation it doesn’t really matter. In many contexts you could probably just say “Want to go on the third?” and the person you’re talking to will understand you mean August the third of this current year.
It does to me. mm-dd is not used at all in my native language and would be considered grammatically incorrect. Since English doesn’t prescribe it I have no reason to fully accept it.
Note that I still prefer to write ISO 8601 dates but my spoken dates are big-endian.
Middle-endian dates like “June 15th 2046” are just bad, of course.
I commented earlier that having to say more words is inefficient, but what yiu said made me think… In other languages I know, it’s basically spoken as "3rd August’… Eliminating the inefficiency. It’s really more English’s general inefficiency that irks me, more so than the order of the dates lol
Its fine but its unnecessarily long. Its just one syllable/word but its extra.
Two words when used in a sentence. “The 3rd of August” vs “August 3rd”
I feel like you would only say “of August” if someone is staring at you in abject horror completely untethered from the time stream
Yeah I’ve been in those calendar meetings too
I spell out the month, but I’m fancy
yes, I’ll send dates as mm-dd in my personal life as well. only when discussing exact dates for scheduling things, otherwise in conversational messaging it’s mmmm dd
like if we’re talking about when we want to go do x activity, I’ll propose August 8th. but if we’re scheduling trip dates, it’s 08-08 through 09-12
Yes (I’m insane)
Yes as well (Also insane) but its universally ledgable, sorts on computers easier, accomodates timezones and sub-second units. ISO-8601 should be the universal standard, and anyone who says otherwise better show up with a white paper explaining why. None of this dumb american format or javascript web form bullshit, language is about specificity, BE SPECIFIC. Unless you want to go off the rails and talk about relativity, time dialation and reference points… But thats all above my pay grade. ISO-8601 is a golden example of “good enough for normal people”. Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
Yes, kind of.
I shorthand it verbally unless I’m giving a full date, but typed, it’s almost always yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss (whichever part of that is relevant).
I do this because I believe it’s the most logical, it sorts properly without having to use a datetime library, and it can’t be confused with another system (is 12-1-2026 in the future or the past? No way to know just by looking at it).
Just shortening it to MM-dd could cause confusion with anyone not in the US so I’ll typically include the year as well (also useful if I wind up having to look at old notes or emails to not have to figure out the year I meant … Which has happened more than once …)
There’s no reason the two need to be the same. We don’t talk in heximal either
Only a truly insane person would use mm-dd-yy in conversation. “Want to go to a hockey game with me ten seventeen twenty-six?” Or worse, “…oh four oh seven twenty-seven.” Pure madness.
Conversationally, mmm d yy or d mmm yy (usually just shortened to mmm d or d mmm) is where it’s at.
I feel like DD/MM/YYYY is the same as doing: ss:mm:HH and I find that confusing.
The point is the order of importance, i am gonna need to know day and month we are in way more often than the year, i also want to know more often the hours and the minutes than the seconds, the seconds change way too often to be useful in most scenarios
I see the duality in this but I still think both are valid. When telling the time, there’s usually no point in including the seconds since they’ll have changed before you finish saying the whole thing anyway. In spoken word IMO it makes sense to go from more specific to less specific, and even not include extra parts sometimes (e. g. “today is the 3rd” when it’s expected to know the month and, well, year from context, or “it’s half past” to someone whom you’ve told the time a couple of minutes ago).
That’s really funny. DMY is more like Hms in that it is in descending order of relevance. Most people asking the date or time are looking for the hour of the day or the day of the month, and the rest is context.
Files get sorted by alphanumerical order so ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is objectively superior in that regard.
My comment was about vocal human interaction, not on a device.
I agree with that in principle, but a) it should be in meta data and b) it should be abstracted so the user can display any format they wish. As a last resort, in the file name, sure. That standard adds a lot of extra time gumpf
