This is the way.
Hot take: 2025-Jan-27 is better than 2025-01-27 in monolingual contexts.
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The beautiful part of 2025/01/27 is that it can inherently be sorted without formatting.
Y’all be riskin it without holocene crypty
SYSM:YY.DM.TzYDY.H.H
4:40.42p EST on Jan 28, 12,025 ->
- 4120:20.21.-4285.1.6
That’s the one that was active when I started typing. However, I change it randomly using the decay of a radioactive isotope that is randomly chosen by the decay of a separate amount of Uranium-238. I’m two randoms in. This way, my time records are always encrypted using open-science source and the government can’t hack the pictures of my parking spots at the oncology center to sell them to the NIMBYs at MetAlphabet AI.
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Maybe in programming or technical documentation, but no, when I check the date I want to know the day and the month, beyond that, it’s all unnecessary information for everyday use, and we have it right in Europe.
You can’t change my mind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These people are just too far into the ISO rabbit hole. I completely agree with you that DD.MM.YYYY is the best format for everyday use.
Thank you! 😂
E: I even said how I can see it being useful in some applications, but fuck, if I’m looking at the date it’s almost certainly to see what day it is today, what day (and maybe month) an appointment is, what day some food is going off, stuff like that. I know what month and year it is right now, and if I want to know the time, I look at a clock, not a calendar. If they love extra and often unnecessary information so much they’re free to use whatever format they want, but I’m good, and so are many others, and they just need to learn to be ok with that lmao
Nah. Sort that alphabetically and you end up with a useless list.
And sorting the other formats alphabetically does not yield the same result?
No…?
Okay I don’t think I quite get which part you are sorting alphabetically here.
the “best” format for everyday use is each individual person’s personal preference.
you may be more used to DDMMYYYY due to culture, language, upbringing, and usage. in the same vein, i am more used to YYYYMMDD because in chinese we go 年月日 (year-month-day), and it makes organizing files and spreadsheet entries much more intuitive anyways.
Well in that case people should stop complaining about us wanting to use DD.MM.YYYY it’s perfectly fine and the only format that should be shot on sight is MM.DD.YYYY
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You can do 1-26
I don’t know what this means, also I don’t have to adhere to anything, the European format works perfectly well for me, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1-26 or 01/26 is a way of writing the month and day. in this particular example, it is describing the 26th day of January, or January 26. the year is omitted in this instance because, in this context, it is a way of demonstrating how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance without fully adhering to ISO 8601 guidelines.
So it’s just adding the American format (which categorically does not demonstrate how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance, but literally the opposite) in to the mix and not providing any help or making things any simpler lol
Thanks for explaining, but if the person who introduced the 1-26 concept in to the conversation (and could have easily just said “MM/DD” to make their point significantly clearer), or the other person with their lecture are actually trying to change my, or anyone else’s mind, or make their personal preference more appealing to others, this (making things more complicated, when they are already perfectly straightforward, just not how they like it) isn’t the fucking way to do it lmmfao
2025-01-26 so it’s 26.01. It’s easy to look up. All you need to know is that the date goes YYY-MM-DD (year -> month -> day). You do the same thing when you write 26.01 instead of 26.01.2025, since you are just dropping information about the year.
Starting out with “you can’t change my mind” is fine but then don’t argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked. Use whichever format you like better but don’t pretend that’s more than personal preference at that point.
The big argument for the iso date-time format is lexicographic ordering. If you don’t care about that, then don’t use it.
Just as a side-note: some european countries were in fact considering switching to the iso date-time format but didn’t because it would have been an inconvenience to people already familiar with different formats. Basically the “it’s better but people prefer the older format” thing we have going on in the comment sections right now.
Cheers
don’t argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked.
I literally said I don’t know what a thing means (and now that you’ve explained, it’s a useless instruction to give me, since all it does is add extra steps for those of us already perfectly happy with the European format lmfao), and made no assertion beyond my personal preference, kindly get off your fucking high horse.
It’s better but people prefer the older format
The metric system has entered the chat.
just nitpicking, but technically ISO 8601 does not (currently) permit the omission of the year.
if information is to be omitted, it must be done in ascending order of significance, so you can omit, in order, seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
(if you omit the month, that’s just the year left so why bother with ISO 8601 lmao)
Fair
You can’t change my mind.
That’s not a good thing. That attitude limits you from improving how you do things because you’ve gotten emotionally attached to some arbitrary … never mind. Have a nice day.
I’m almost 40 and now just realizing my insistence on how to structure all my folders and notes is actually an ISO standard. Way to go me.
I stumbled upon it years ago because sorting by name sorts by date. There was no other thought put into it.
It’s incredibly annoying that in clinical research we are prohibited from using it because every date must comply with the GCP format (DD mmm yyyy). Every file has the GCP date appended to the end.
How is day smaller than month? There are up to 12 values for month, but up to 31 for days
obvious troll is obvious
It’s sorted by the length of time, so a day is shorter than a month.
In one work report, I recorded the date as “1/13/25”, “13/1/25” and “13JAN2025”
I have my preference, but please for the love of all that is fluffy in the universe, just stick to one format…
“13.1.25”, not “13/1/25”.
This is Belize and Micronesia erasure.
[email protected] gang, rise up
Server had been down for about two days but just got it crossposted there, thanks!
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
You can skip the year and just do 1-26
Sometimes you need the year
Yeah it’s funny seeing everyone in here thinking only of the one specific thing they use this for, not recognizing that the most useful order can change depending on the purpose of the data.
Well you read the least frequently changing part first, the year, because if you read the seconds first, then the thing’s already changed before you’ve even finished reading it. /s
What about evenly distancing the 3 shortest time intervals to promote fast reading
mm:DD:MM:ss:YYYY:hh
I often see the year being the most important in my archive. Followed by month, then day (which is often left out because the document is monthly).
And the why; because it sorts alphabetically.
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
Maybe it’s not least important for everyone?
Almost like the preference can change depending on application…
If I’m looking at a folder full of spreadsheets, one each month (or even day) for several years, and they are all titled according to YYYY-MM-DD. All you need to do is sort by filename and now you have it broken down by year, into one spreadsheet per month/day.
And only needed to click one button to sort them into an easily readable format.
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right?
Because it’s the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It’s first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.
ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder
Arent there uses other than ordering files?
The ISO standard is best for ordering files, but that doesnt mean its good for other things
Its impossible to confuse it with the other 2 presented in this post so you could use it for files and use another one for other things
Edit: i may have been misunderstanding the context in which the ISO standard is claimed to be superior
The fact that you can’t confuse it with other formats is precisely the advantage. With any other format (besides the awful lettered month) you have to use context clues to be sure you’re reading it correctly if the day is less than 13.
Europe: 10/12/2025 USA: 12/10/2025 If you don’t have context as to which system this is, would 2025/12/10 make things less ambiguous?
To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that’s not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.
Let’s do it!
My stupid ass read this top to bottom and I was confused why anyone would start with seconds
I just use millis since epoch
(Recently learned that this isn’t accurate because it disguises leap seconds. The standard was fucked from the start)
I often have to refrain myself from using ISO-8601 in regular emails. In a business context the MM/DD/YYYY is so much more prevalent that I don’t want to stand out.
Filenames on a share drive though? ISO-8601 all the way idgaf
