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.

  • mleEnglish
    8·
    12 hours ago

    ISO8601 is grat 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.

    • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      4 hours ago

      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 :-) ?

      • Bertuccio@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        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.

    • Bertuccio@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Well that throws out DD-MM-YYYY because it’s second smallest, smallest, fourth smallest, third smallest…

  • darkpanda@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    11 hours ago

    My favourite is when you’re reading documentation for an API or an SDK or whatever and the examples show things like “2024-05-05” as the date where they’re both the same number and you can’t discern it at all. Like, use Halloween or Christmas or something as the date so it’s always obvious, eh?

  • mrbn@lemmy.caEnglish
    64·
    23 hours ago

    "What. No it’s month first,” responded his girlfriend Christine. The couple subsequently got in a huge fight and broke up, meaning their relationship only lasted from 10/01/2023-05/03/2024, with neither knowing if that is 6 months or over a year.

    What a good line 😂

  • Omnificer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    23 hours ago

    I didn’t know it was called ISO8601 but I started naturally using it at work. It removes confusion among international colleagues, makes it way easier to sort data, and is also good for version control of docs.