2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
The sane way of dealing with it is to use UTC everywhere internally and push local time and local formatting up to the user facing bits. And if you move time around as a string (e.g. JSON) then use ISO 8601 since most languages have time / cron APIs that can process it. Often doesn’t happen that way though…
Generally yes, that’s the way to do it, but there are plenty of times where you need to recreate the time zone something was created for, which means additionally storing the time zone information.
Definitely. If your servers aren’t using UTC, then when you’re trying to sync data between different timezones, you’re making it harder for yourself.
This is what I try to do in the few apps I’ve written that had to deal with dates and times
People aren’t computers.
I think you skipped part of the sentence.
I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.
English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of SaturnImagine dating a meeting, “Day of Odin, May 7, 2025.” Imagine a store receipt that says, “Day of Thor, June 5, 2025.” Imagine telling a friend, “July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!”
THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.
We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let’s remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!
That would work better if Latin wasn’t there before English. Mars Victor!
As a Hungarian, I approve.
As an American, I can’t get people in my team to standardize their email signatures with correct spelling.
Everyone should use date-time groups so we’re all on the same page down to the second.
DDHHMMSSZmmmYY
%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ
Where I live, “DD. MM. YYYY” is the standard but some old tombstones use
Do you know why one would ever do that? 20(02/05)25 feels like the “Don’t Dead Open Inside” of dates.
Which is exactly why they’re used on tombstones. See, the world makes sense after all!
ISO 8601 allows all kinds of crazy time stamps. RFC 3339 is much nicer and simpler, and the sweet spot is at the intersection of ISO 8601 and RFC 3339.
Then again, ISO 8601 contains some nice things that RFC 3339 does not, like ranges and durations, recurrences…
I just don’t like to be forced to include the damn year everytime, and if you cut the year from ISO 8601 you get the american MM-DD order, which everybody hates.
I like DD/MM/YYYY. 🤷🏻♂️
If it’s just in casual conversation or emails DD/MM/YYYY is fine, but if you’re naming documents or something in a professional setting, you should really always include the year anyway.
I am a big fan of iso 8601, I just wish it was possible to write more dates than February 27th, 2013 with it
Yeh but for that one day though, everything just works so well.
Harhar
I work at a global company an in my team there are people from 5 continents. we use 27-Feb-23. It’s the only way nobody gets confused and it’s only 1 char more. (Tbf nobody would be confused only my boss that is american lol)
Is that February 27th 2023 or February 23rd 2027?
You can even save a character by using NATO dates (leaving out the useless hyphens): 01DEC1953
Are you planning stuff 2 years ahead already?
I would still be confused by this…
You know, I used to think ISO 8601 was just a boring technical standard for writing dates. But now I see it’s clearly the first step in a grand master plan! First, they make us write the year first, then the month, then the day-suddenly, our beloved 17.05.2025 turns into 2025-05-17. My birthday now looks like a WiFi password, and my calendar feels like a math equation.
But it doesn’t stop there. Today it’s the date format, tomorrow we’ll all be reading from right to left, and before you know it, our keyboards will be rearranged so QWERTY is replaced with mysterious squiggles and dots. Imagine the panic:
“First they came for our dates, then they came for our keyboards!”
At this rate, I’ll be drinking mint tea instead of coffee, my local kebab shop will start offering lutefisk shawarma, and Siri will only answer to “Inshallah.” The right-wing tabloids will have a field day:
“Western Civilization in Peril: Our Months and Days Held Hostage!”
But let’s be honest-if the worst thing that happens is we finally all agree on how to write today’s date, maybe world peace isn’t so far off. Until then, I’ll be over here, clutching my calendar and practicing my right-to-left reading skills… just in case.
(Don’t worry,this was just a joke! No offense intended-unless you’re a die-hard fan of confusing date formats, in which case, may the ISO be ever in your favor!)
Peace!
Make QWERTY into ABCDEF ;b
My goodness, some of the comments in here must come from people who thought that those writing the standard were morons who did no research.
I feel like YYYYMMDD (without dashes) might be a format in ISO 8601, but I’m fully expecting to be corrected soon. But I didn’t say think, I said feel. YYYYMMDD has a similar vibe to YYYY-MM-DD, ya feel me?
It is. Photos and code merges use it.
Nope, you are correct! From the Wikipedia page, which cites the standards document:
- Representations can be done in one of two formats – a basic format with a minimal number of separators or an extended formatwith separators added to enhance human readability. The standard notes that “The basic format should be avoided in plain text.” The separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the hyphen, while the colon is used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds). For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as “2009-01-06” in the extended format or as “20090106” in the basic format without ambiguity.
So xkcd got a detail wrong? I’m cancelling my subscription!
Rich is right, since this is the date format that sorts correctly in filenames.
And it is easily extensible to YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to include the time of day
Are you an obsidian user?
I feel called out and I’m hiding in the bushes reading comments.
Haha yep, you caught me. I’m a fan of the unique note feature
Omg thank you!! Everyone sees my notes thinks I’m crazy for obsessing… It’s the correct fucking sort!
Won’t be true after 9999-12-31, however.
If I, my software, or my data last this long, I will have nearly 8000 years to resolve it. Which is to say, the year 9998 is going to get busy.
If humanity survives until then, we can implement 9-digit dates and delay the problem until Y100K.
Oh no! The Y10K bug!
Can’t wait for the Y40k bug, when Tyranids begin to infect our brains.
Bold of you to assume there isn’t already a genestealer cult on Terra. Washington specifically.
That…would explain a lot
Can be solved with a small shellscript adding a leading zero to all filenames with the format.
natural sort ftw
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don’t have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn’t strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as ‘2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf’) you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
I bet you could make a one liner to rename files with YYYY-MM-DD to 0YYYY-MM-DD fairly easily. Not a problem.
It’s an easy fix at least, just check if you’re comparing numbers on both sides and switch to a simple numerical sort.
I think Windows used to get this wrong, but it was fixed so long ago that I’m not even sure now.
Who’s Rich? Did you mean Randall?
…dammit, the only comics I read are XKCD and OOTS and I done fucked up.
How can you sleep on Oglaf
Banished to back in time to hang with Ozy and Millie
The good ones tend to filter their way out.
(I do also read whatever John Allison is currently working on.)
Working for a global clinical research company, DD-Mmm-YYYY is the easiest for everyone to understand and be on the same page. It’s bad enough identifying which date you’re capturing in metadata without also trying to juggle multiple date formats.
