You're Writing the Date Wrong

Now I know, that sounds a bit pretentious, but its true! The way we write dates can often be confusing and strange, especially when working with digital files. But before I can get into details, I need to outline a more abstract way of representing dates. A date has three core components, a year, a month, and a day. To represent these in a more abstract way, YYYY will be used to represent the year (or YY for the last two digits of the year), MM for the month (meaning if the number of the month is below 10, there will be a leading 0), and DD for the day (will also have a leading 0).

In a post about me discussing standards, its odd that I don’t know the name for this system (if it has one), but if you know please let me know so I can add it.

The first way of writing the date is the American way, or MM/DD/YYYY. This is probably the most common way to write the date, probably thanks to a large portion of the internet using it (There may be some bias here as I interact with largely American internet communities). The other way is the way most of the rest of the world does it, or DD/MM/YYYY. This way might make sense to some, as the smaller unit of time is used first and then it increases in length.

So which way is better? Neither. This is where ISO 8601 comes in, or YYYY/MM/DD. ISO 8601 is an international standard that was developed to set a standard for how dates should be used for international communication. Aside from it being an international standard, it does one key advantage. file sorting. In most operating systems, file sort alphabetically by default. While normally this isn’t a problem, if you date your files for any reason, such as file backups, they can get out of order. This is where ISO 8601 comes to save the day. If you date your files according to ISO 8601, when sorted alphabetically they will also be sorted chronologically. Now, I’m aware that some file managers have the option to sort by date, but this often has to be done every time and some file managers don’t have this feature, so it makes more sense to just use ISO 8601 anyway.

If you think using international standards is pointless, think again. Things like unicode (UTF-8), paper sizes (ISO 216), SI units, QR codes, and ISBN are all examples of international standards that are used daily. Its important to know and use these for easier interactions between nations, development of products and software, and much more. Unfortunately, America tends to be reluctant to adopt many of these international standards (cough cough metric system cough), and this has lead to some issues before that could have been avoided if an international standard was adopted (Mars Climate Orbiter comes to mind).

At the end of the day, writing dates will always be somewhat contested among groups, but at least there is an objective best way to write them.