To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like “the time is a quarter to eleven” do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of “ten past ten” if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?
Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you’re hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn't have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it’s the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send “01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)” because it’s the only way to be sure
As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like 15 ago (Spanish) being 15 Aug (English), but 1 ene (Spanish) aren’t that similar to 1 Jan (English).
And for the usual “But English is used everwhere! I live in X!” crowd: NO, it isn’t. Not everything you see as an “expat” is the same as the actual locals with their own language.
Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don’t make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn’t make any sense, and don’t make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
What if you create a file that has information related to a date that the file wasn’t created on?
For example, you write a report about an event that happened two weeks ago. Now the created and modified metadata is tied to today’s date, not the date two weeks ago.
I usually give file names a human readable name like “report on the event 27.7.1994”. Makes it easier for other people to understand if I need to pass the file on.
For images I keep the original file name when I store it in a database (Capture one/Lightroom/etc) in folders by the year and then month they are taken: 2023 --> 08 and so on. If I eksport images for a specific project, I will keep the original file name but add project name and give it a number based on sequence. Everything else is in the metadata
I always have written my dates this way. It’s one of those things that always seemed weird to me and then when I realize that only in America do we write our dates MM-DD-YYYY /facepalm
ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.
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