this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
616 points (92.8% liked)

Standardization

452 readers
1 users here now

Professionals have standards! Community for all proponents, defenders and junkies of the Metric (International) system, the ISO standards (including ISO 8601) and other ways of standardization or regulation!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 116 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If the date format is not YYYY-MM-DD it can fuck right off.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

ISO 8601. Unironically the only ISO number I also remember.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Long live I-SO! I-SO! I-SO!

[–] mattaw 3 points 1 year ago

I also remember as PHP programming language still won't do it with this function: DateTimeInterface::ISO8601 DATE_ISO8601 https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.datetimeinterface.php#datetime.constants.iso8601

You need the DateTimeInterface::ISO8601_EXPANDED which can actually accept non compliant strings too.

PHP - wherever you see an intuitive solution it's wrong or has important caveats.

[–] Boreal 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My favorite thing about this date format is using it in file names. Sorting the files by name also sorts them by date.

Meeting notes 2023-06-29.txt Meeting notes 2023-06-30.txt Meeting notes 2023-07-01.txt

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I know that they use that format in daily life in Asia but to me it's the "computer format" for this exact reason.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thi is the way.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Everything is right about it:

  • Lexographic sort
  • Unambiguous months and days
  • Acceptable on any document of record (lab, legal, medical, personal)
  • Readable by nearly any culture (even us Americans)
[–] kamenoko 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

for storing dates it's awesome, for displaying dates it's time to teach your programmer how to format shit for humans.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It actually is the best for displaying all-number dates to people as well because no one in their right mind will ever do yyyy-dd-mm.

So if you see the year first, you know the format. When the year is last and you see a date like 03-02-2023, you have to take into account the nationality of the author to know if it's March 2nd or February 3rd.

But 2023-02-03 it becomes clear that it's February 3rd.