4mo ago

Canadian man reading date never knows which is day and which is month unless day is above 12

thebeaverton.com Canadian man reading date never knows which is day and which is month unless day is above 12

KITCHENER – Local man Dalton Strickland, whose data entry job regularly requires him to read dates off a form and put them into a computer, literally never knows which date is the day and which is the month unless the day is above 12. “Are we using the American MM-DD-YYYY system or the rest of […]

Because he didn't know about ISO8601. The only correct date format, especially in Canada.

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ISO8601 is great and all, but even without a common standard, I feel it should either be largest to smallest unit, or smallest to largest. YMD or DMY. Anything else is just asking for misunderstandings.
- YMD is the way to go, because it auto-sorts on a computer.
  Even when you tuck on the time, or would you prefer 59:46:13-14:10:2024 :-) ?
  
  I'm not disagreeing in general, but I need to point out that this is like saying you should write Arabic numerals in order of decreasing powers of 10 because it autosorts on a computer.
  It's the reverse. Computers automatically sort Arabic numerals and dates written in decreasing powers because those are the correct formats.
  
  Are computers the most important thing?
  Usually when I read a date I hardly care about year, because most events I read about are within a year
  
  Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system and for what purpose, under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.
  
  Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system
  I'm choosing one for humans, that'd seem to be the group that uses date systems most. Picking a new datesystem for each purpose would be insane, but also exactly what's happening in computer systems.
  under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.
  I fail to see that conclusion? Why would that be the most logical?
  
  So the first point was that depending on your files/archives and how you access it, year or month or day may be more relevant to the user, which is why I was saying it's dependent on the user, so I don't agree that a human centric solution is always going to say the year is less relevant.
  And then if we are going to prioritize organizing the numbers in such a way as to save the eyes a millisecond of time, for standard usage month would be the orienting date since you need to make sure you are looking at today's month, and then day would be the next necessary date, and then you'd still need the year there, so you'd end up with Month Day Year. Putting Day first would be just as wrong as putting year first because it is irrelevant until you establish the month, it's too granular.
- Well that throws out DD-MM-YYYY because it's second smallest, smallest, fourth smallest, third smallest....
  
  Heh... not what I meant, but technically correct

28 comments