YYYY-MM-DDISO 8601 my beloved
YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS±zzzz
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In fact the Linux date command even has an iso flag:
date --iso-8601date -Ismy beloved.
Yep and it needs to use hyphens and not slashes. It helps avoid missed typos or mis-reads in some situations, especially if hand-written.
and it’s perfectly sortable
oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.
I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it’s unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don’t even use a year.
There are also variants with single dots too. I sometimes do timestamps without any separator too, depending on the context (such as file backups):
YYYYMMDDin example 20260805.I actually used to do single dots in my own file/folder names. It’s probably my favorite way visually, since it’s a minimal separator and as you showed it works without a separator at all.
Ew.
yyyymmdd
Tis the Canadian way.
ISO datetime, let’s goooooo YYYYMMDDHHmmSS
ISO 8601 or gtfo
I proper shit post would have suggested “mm/dd/yyyy”.
The problem is not the format itself, its just sometimes we don’t know which format is used: 07/07/26
Edit: This was probably a bad example, because it does not matter which format, as it is clear it is 7th of July 2026 in both possible formats. A better example: 01/02/26
Obviously that’s February 26th 2001
01/02/26
Uh, it’s clearly my first 26th birthday at two in the morning
You are so evil! :D
The one that ends us with f… I mean ISO 8601 of course
ISO-8601 or RFC-3339 is the way. It’s not about which is better, but about that it would be confusing to use MMDDYYYY or DDMMYYYY since the other exists.
Why? dd/mm/yyyy isnt practical. If you are asking someone to check out part of a book, you wouldn’t say “paragraph 4, chapter 3”, you start broad and become more specific. Calendars, at least in the US, are organized by month. You have turn turn to the month page before finding the date, it makes more sense to say month first because its the first piece of information that you need (unless its a more rare case that you are talking about an event in another year).
Im sure programmers prefer something different, but humans shouldn’t have to communicate differently to make computing easier. Computing exists to make human life easier, not the other way around.
mm/dd/yyyy is horrendous and inconsistent, you can argue that yyyy/mm/dd is correct, but for daily use dd/mm/yyyy is way better
What is inconsistent about it? That’s a weird argument against its use.
I like it because it’s in order of smallest maximum integer. I know that’s not why we use it in the US but it’s still satisfying to me to see the first number smaller than the second on all but 78 days of the year.
For daily use — like, if someone asks me the date — I don’t normally bother telling them the year anyway (nor the month, for that matter). But for situations wherein the year is important enough to mention, year/month/day all the way.
We regularly back load the context in English.
Y-DDD-MM
It is currently 6-004-08
*Tips hat*
Y’dameThis is art.
other formats are confusing
Good luck sorting anything by date!
AKA typically the single most relevant reason to record one at all. But yes. Most people prefer to begin by thinking about the least significant piece of information, and then go from there.
Date format has nothing to do with sorting by date.
For organizing my stuff I use
yyyy/mm/ddbecause in my opinion it’s much better for that. Otherwisedd/mm/yyyy.Month first is better because when someone says the date aloud, they start with the month “August 5th, 2026”
it’s either DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD.
