Why can’t everybody just standardize on YYYY-MM-DD?
It’s so confusing when you’re trying to data enter receipts and figure out the various date formats in use. Is “03/06/04″ March 6th 2004 or June 3rd, 2004, or June 4th 2003?
Who the hell knows? If I didn’t have a rough idea of when I’d bought something, I’d have no idea which date format they’re using.
Governments around the world pass laws about measurement standards (e.g. the metric system), so I propose they start enforcing a date format. YYYY-MM-DD works for me because:
a) It uses all the digits in the year so you know you’re looking at a year.
b) It goes in ascending order of granularity so it’ll sort correctly if you’re going alphabetical (if you’re using the leading zero, as you should be).
c) It has nothing to do with language. The only reason MM/DD/YY is so popular is because Anglos always start with the month when they write a date (e.g. March 6th, 2004). It’s a different format in French.
I don’t really care what separator is used in the new improved date format, as long as it’s not “/”, or anything else that screws up URLs.
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