ISO 8601 | Hacker News Reader

ISO 8601

xkcd.com

23 pointsgraderjs17 comments

RFC3339 (similar to ISO 8601, but more strict) is great for computer readable use cases, but I've found it lacking for human use cases since there is still technically room for ambiguity and it's unfamiliar to most people. For anything like filling out a form that a person will read, I've started using the following:

12 Jun 2020

This is about as unambiguous as I can imagine for any person to read, and they require no familiarity with the format for it to be as such.

I agree that format is easy. Very clear. For English speaking, "Western" Gregorian dates & times. But there's a big world out there. Have you seen: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#dates-and-tim... ?

What about 2020-07-12 requires familiarity?

12 Jul 2020 requires knowing the names of months in the current locale, which is inconvenient.

It could also mean 7 Dec 2020

I've never seen anyone write dates as YYYY-DD-MM. That's even crazier than MM/DD/YYYY.

Americans

I know that Americans use MM/DD/YYYY. But YYYY-DD-MM???

And I've never seen anyone write time with minutes or seconds before the hours.

Time: hh:mm:ss, never mm:ss:hh or ss:mm:hh

Why should the date format be any different?

Time goes from the largest to the smallest: hours, minutes, seconds. And the same applies to date: years, months, days.

I've certainly seen things like "ten past four" written, and it's commonly spoken, but so are "four ten" and "sixteen ten".

But the date is most commonly spoken in Europe (including in Britain and Ireland) in the form "twelfth of August, twenty twenty-two", so 12/8/2022 (the most common date format in UK/IE) follows from that.

It doesn't conveniently sort lexicographically.

Indeed. Perhaps I should have specified that by writing "human readable" I was implying hand-written.

Now I've seen that, I really want more dates written on angry black cats. I'm even prepared to switch to the USA middle endian date style if that's what it takes.

Which is strange, in a way. As an european, my mind screams about USA dates not going from least to most discriminating precision. How can anybody think this makes any sense.

Then I look at my adress, written :

Street housenumber bus, postalcode city, country

Which is just as insanely middle endian as the US date and of course it makes total sense to me. I still claim to be a rational being.

Finally something the UK can lead on!

10 Downing Street London SW1A 2AA United Kingdom

(Although the postcode will always be a problem. They can be unique to a single address like this one, a single office in a large building, a building, part of a street, a whole street, several streets, a whole island, or all of British Antarctic Territory -- BIQQ 1ZZ.)

And it's 12 August 2022 ('the twelfth of August, twenty twenty-two').

Of course the ISO standard has to be paid for, whereas RFC3339, which is not quite the same, covers most of the date-time formats and can be viewed freely.

RFC-3339.

https://xkcd.com/927/

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