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0 pointsbaby12y ago0 comments

> so you get to the most important information first.

Very debatable. I've always found YYYYMMDD to be the most pertinent format as it gives you the "most important information first". As in, DD is unusable if you don't know the month, and the month is unusable if you don't know the year.

I like to picture a world where everyone use YYYYMMDD, the Metric system and English for technical terms (I'm from France and I hate when we invent new terms for technical terms).

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JonnieCache12y ago· 2 in thread

Most humans know what month and year they're dealing with already, and look to a date display to inform them of DD vastly more often than they look for MM, more often than they look for YYYY.

When dealing with data processing, the concerns are obviously different. But then it barely matters which order you use anyway.

sixothree12y ago

I usually just use HL7 datetimes YYYYMMDDHHMMSSFFFF since it's mostly iso compatible and more importantly allows for varying levels of unknown values.

You may know what month something happened to you but you may not know the day in which case you would just write 201308 which is a perfectly valid date. You may know what day and what hour someone was born but you may not know the minutes or seconds (ex. 2013080506).

By using it, there is no ambiguity because the year signals the order of values. It also sorts better than any of the other methods.

babyOP12y ago

You have to ask yourself in what cases do you have to write a date, or do you have to read a date.

For most "real life" cases I could find it was smarter to put YYYY first. And for an impressive number of cases, the day of the month didn't really matter and could then be omitted more easily.

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