While the sane world specifies dates in the form dd/mm/yyyy, with the units going from small-medium-large, the Americans insist on specifying their dates as mm/dd/yyyy, so medium-small-large. Sometimes I realise while I’m reading a date, sometimes I don’t, sometimes it takes too long to sort it out, especially when it comes from some non-American company who wouldn’t normally use the US format, but they’re using some software that does it for them. Perhaps I should write all my timestamps as MM:SS:HH when conversing with them?
As an aside, why do we default to showing dates – dd/mm/yyyy – as small-medium-large and time – HH:MM:SS – as large-medium-small? Perhaps there’s something to be said for consistency and this ISO8601 format after all…
Don’t even get me started on the people who’ve learnt nothing from the time and money spent on Y2K and still insist on writing two digit years. Looking casually, I see you’ve got a photo there saying it was taken on “07/08/09”. Was that in 1909 or 2009? August or July? Perhaps you’re using your own mutilated date format and you mean …
I’ve noticed that even though people will write the date as mm/dd/yyyy, they still create folders and URLs as yyyy/mm/dd… at least everywhere I’ve looked they do. Now here’s a challenge; find me a pathological filesystem structure where someone has decided that data from an arbitrary date – say, – goes in ./06/23/2019 or ./23/May/2019!
As for timezones and local names rather than GMT and offsets, what’s a CST, GST, CRST? Sample from a website; “A scheduled outage for 3 1/2 hours from 8 pm Central Mountain Time” – gee, helpful, how do I convert that to AEST? How about GMT+n and give the rest of the world a chance of figuring it out! Seems that a lot of companies want to have a world-wide presence, but only by forcing the world to adapt to them. Hmm, is that two rants, perhaps I should keep time and date separate.
ps. If you create files with dates in them, ISO8601 or some subset will really help you sort them and keep a handle on them; take thirty handmade blobs named variations on old-pc-backup-051307 and old-pc-backup-110906 and try to quickly find the order they go in if you don’t belief me!
