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 fork Alternate Data Stream.
As for why it’s better:
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 :)