As an American I can fully confirm that 3/11/2011 is obnoxiously ambiguous. It affects us. But most Americans (particularly outside of science / engineering fields) are too thick-headed to recognize the problem or think about ways to improve it.
So I do what I can. I don't even ask what time format something belongs in. I just write ISO8601 by default. If someone complains then I point them to the international standard and ask whether we want to be an internationally standards-compliant company.
One manager said that our customers aren't international. It was a reasoned argument and I like having customers. But all others drop the argument at "international company" and "standards-compliant"
This is my approach as well. I've never gotten a complaint about it, which proves to me that the format is understandable AND unambiguous.
And also ask but why are we not targeting international customers.
The latter was an ice rink whose customers are very physically local. Local teams do compete internationally but the ice rink itself isn't an international org.
sigh.
ISO 8601 everything. I'm religious about it. I write it in messages, on government forms, anything that doesn't force me to use a different format. On a bit of my insistence, we use ISO 8601 notation for all dates at home. I think the benefit is quite obvious once one starts using it.
Perhaps use a format like 3/Nov/2021?
Maybe it's just Croatian that's ruining it for everyone.
Around this part of the world, almost everyone calls tea by some variation of the word "chai". But not us. In Polish, it's herbata!
(And in general case, of electronic documents with wider audience, using 3/Nov/2021 excludes people who don't know English (or the language in which you encoded the name of the month).)
(Real use case: I recently sent a Polish equivalent of OSHA form to my line manager in UK, and I used a bilingual version. As you can imagine, I set the example by filling my part of the document using ISO 8601 for dates, so that once the document returns to the Polish corporate office, there won't be any possible confusions.)
People were unfamiliar with showering and brushing their teeth. We move forward.
On government forms (and other paper forms), I use 3/11/2021. It's unambiguous; nobody would expect it to mean anything other than "3rd of November of 2021". The ambiguity only happens once you add the Internet to the mix, and even then, only in English-language websites (I wouldn't expect anything other than DD/MM/YYYY on Portuguese-language websites, and the same probably applies to most other languages).
In a globalized economy, local date formats are just one of those annoyances that serve no benefit, cause everyone unnecessary hassle, occasionally causes expensive errors, and that should have long ago been replaced with an international standard.
What developers also suck at, in practice, is data-typing their output properly. If I see 5/2/11 on a US site while using my work laptop, I can't be sure whether it's the US notation written by the author, or date localized by my browser for UK format, which has the day and month reversed. I can't tell if the date is localized or not, or how it was generated.
Just say no to all that complexity, and use ISO 8601 everywhere. My controversial view here is: in this industry, we're still in a privileged position to force the entire world to standardize on the important things, like dates and times. So let's do so, and get everyone on board with an international standard, instead of just unwittingly pushing the USA defaults. We are pushing things, that comes with "software eating the world". So let's push things that make sense.
Also, should you want to change the locale (via a preference or override somehow), in most browsers you can pass it as the first parameter.
I think your view is very much a classic developers view - sure it would be nice to be able to dictate software requirements to businesses but you are probably going to be quite angry as your version of right and someone else's are going to be different.
There are absolutely no usecases where the US date format makes sense. No, having it written in the order you prefer to pronounce it is not an argument. Especially not in the language where you have to learn spelling. It is just what US people are used to.
The thing is, we sort of are! As I mentioned upthread, notation and language are being strongly influenced by increased use of software in every facet of our lives. The way people note numbers, dates, express search terms, etc. are all impacted by what the software accepts and displays by default. We have an opportunity here to push for positive cultural change around international standardization, so let's make good use of it, instead of squandering it by just implementing whatever seems to resemble the local status quo the most.
3/11/2021
3/11/2021
Even having been told that there's a difference, you cannot know which is which.
Even if you think you know because you found an unambigious date like 31/11/2021 somewhere, you still shouldn't be confident because there are many sources of dates, and they're formatted by many different pieces of code. Some may be doing the "right" thing, some may be using US formatting. A complex web application like the Azure or AWS consoles might have literally thousands of sources of dates formatted by a thousand different pieces of code.
Before the 12th of the month, they're all totally and utterly useless for 96% of the world unless they use ISO 8601.
BTW: I just tested this with the Azure portal by clicking through some Log Analytics related things. I got it to show me 3 different date formats, 2 of which would have been ambiguous earlier in the month, and one of which changed between two tenants. So even if you learn which parts of the UI you can trust to be correct, switching tenants will invalidate your experience.
I’ve scheduled cron jobs for February 31st, to have them tracked but disabled.
users who don't know what ISO 8601 is would learn, simply because when that format is used in software, it is consistent!
Wikipedia claims [0] that is the date format in Kazakhstan, but only for the Kazakh language, not for Russian. (Maybe there is someone here from Kazakhstan who can confirm if that is true or not.)
A lot of companies don't have any employees in Kazakhstan (which means they can ignore this for internal systems); and many companies wouldn't have any customers there either (which means they can ignore it for external systems as well).
That doesn't seem like a standard API call.
https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/...
Your code has a bug, missing constructor.
Just yesterday I learned that on an ISO Spanish keyboard, both of those browsers will pop up a help menu for ⌘⇧7. The logic goes: ⇧7 means / on a Spanish ISO keyboard, and ⇧/ means ? on a US-ANSI keyboard, therefore ⌘⇧7 is by the transitive property of inter-layout shift functions equivalent to ⌘?, which is the shortcut for opening the help menu.
They don't pop open the help menu if you press ⌘⇧', the actual ISO Spanish layout way to type ⌘?
Something like http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/9150730dbd4d28...
Page down only sometimes works, and Command+~ to switch same app Windows works in some apps and not others. It's a bit of a train wreck when you want to get rid of their pointless keys.
Although macOS is good in the aspect that combinations akin to AltGr on PCs aren't unique to non-US layouts. I've seen programmers assume it's safe to assign shortcuts to Ctrl-Alt (which simulates AltGr), making it impossible to enter certain characters. Not surprising, as it's not used on the US layout (just as there's no extra key next to the left Shift).
Amusingly, TextMate's author and many early users were European programmers with US-ANSI keyboards (because the various European layouts are just too painful for writing code in ASCII-based programming languages).
TZ=UTC+8. Is your system now set to the timezone UTC+8? No, it's set to UTC-8. Why? I don't know, but I suspect the people who developed this convention, who lived in the US, just didn't want to type a minus.
Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database names instead.
The reference time used in the layouts is the specific time:
Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006
which is Unix time 1136239445. Since MST is GMT-0700, the reference time can be thought of as
01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700`
The US conventions are indeed horrendous.
I am glad I have never met these people.
I disagree. (Or, perhaps I’m insane...) I paused when coming across the ANSI version in the article as I couldn’t tell whether it was YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM. I thought there was a typo or something.
I’ve nothing against the standard, but as Americans have no ‘intuitive’ reason to sort the fields by significance, it is natural for some to incorrectly assume the ANSI version is just the American version written backwards.
E.g. a single character to unambiguously denote weekday, window layout (全／広／高）, and others. Renders everywhere as long as you have a decent CJK font. Bonus: looks a lot less stupid than emojis.
My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single character and as long as it's < 7d ago it's unambiguous what time and day a command exited in case I forget.
You're a bit cheating there :) It's one character that takes up 2 columns.
You could get away with using the first 2 characters from the English names as they are unique. But I know that in English that's unusual but for example in German, the 2 letter abbreviation are the standard ones.
You say weekday, but Google translate and Wikipedia say that 金 means gold?
The days of the week were named after the seven classical planets of astrology (by the Romans, who in turn named the seven classical planets, and hence the days, after Roman deities).
The names were taken up by speakers of Germanic languages, and eventually underwent semantic loan translation: Germanic deities were substituted for the Roman ones (with the exception of Saturday). Some people say that the Germanic deities themselves were culturally identified as one and the same as the Roman deities, but we probably won't ever know for sure (interpretatio germanica, analogously to the interpretatio graeca, the identification of Egyptian, Roman and Greek deities [1]).
And now, a minor correction: The day of Venus, Friday bears the name of the Germanic goddess Frigg, who is not the same as the Norse goddess Freyja. The meeting of the two characters, in a debate against Loki, is described in the Poetic Edda [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_germanica [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokasenna
"金" would be short for "金曜日", a common way to abbreviate weekday names in calendars etc and yes, Friday is indeed the day of gold - I like to imagine it's the old pay day for workers maybe? :D
If the answer comes back very US, then it's middle endian US format. Else it's DMY.
Note that the article is wrong to just say "dd.mm.yy" is used in "Europe". Some countries use yyyy-mm-dd and others dd/mm/yy.
The US format is the only one that's retarded, though.
I was once sent paperwork to fill out that had dates requested in both MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY formats on different pages.
My american users get very angry when they see a date that isn't in dd/mm/yy format.
I wonder how it started? A skim of the internets hasn’t enlightened me.
But people are very good at verbally saying different than is written.
But also, the most sacret of all days has been honored by the one day of the year "said properly" fourth of july!
Tax day is the ides of April, but we just say April 15th.
I use ISO8601 dates everywhere possible. Paper forms in the real world where people look at me strangely, invoices, file names which is really handy for sorting, my personal todo lists, everything.
America first!
- to an outsider, learning that a concept exists: “that is an interesting thing”
- to a beginner, trying to construct the right form or to detect it in quickly spoken speech: “this is annoying and I hate it”
- to an intermediate speaker and beyond: “eh it’s maybe weird but whatever”
I used to hate noun declension in Czech as a beginner (7 cases x plural/singular = 14 forms a noun can take[0]) because it’s intimidating and unintuitive for an English speaker, but now I’m at the “meh” stage.
[0] - then consider that there are 3 genders, and each gender has a handful of “models” (patterns for declining words that look a certain way), and also a bunch of exceptions. Not the hardest thing in the world, for sure. But it’s definitely a bit of a pain
You may not be able to correct it from the Information available but you’ll know something went wrong.
English has a word for twenty and its used in the French way "Four score and seven years" is "quatre-vingts et sept".
Nope, just French.
56 - seksoghalvtreds(indstyve) - six and [two score plus] half [of the] third (score)It's so much fun trying to retrospectively correlate fatal incident data and failing to make sense of anything because some dates are inconsistent. Of course those dates are all the ambiguous kind, otherwise it wouldn't be -that- hilarious /s.
It is one of my favourites (the "8601", the "Security", and the "Bobby Tables")
Ahem, ISO8601 fails for Taiwan and Japan...
I’m not going to comment on the author, though I will acknowledge the abrasive, unhealthy attitude.
Anyway, no. I don’t think there’s a clear “American” standard. Maybe there once was, but I’d just see a pile of numbers these days. It’s hostile to the consumer as it inherently leaves some uncertainty of how it should be consumed.
I will say, and maybe this is American - but I don’t think it is - that I often see dates formatted unambiguously as, e.g. March 11, 2021.
To us, US English seems to skip a lot of the small joining words of various flavours.
It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November.
Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever.
For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date is correct. That is the one single case where there is no confusion. This works as expected for just 4% of the world population, but it is those 4% of the world that get to decide the date format.
It's the most obnoxiously American attitude imaginable to ignore this issue because it doesn't affect them... only the other 96% of the planet.
/rant over