“Europe”, as if there weren’t several languages in Europe with different date formats per language…
None of which start with the month because that would be fuckin stupid
I work with international clients and use 2025-01-26 format. Without it… confusion.
I use ss/mm/hh/dd/MM/YYYY
t.european
This pyramid visualisation doesn’t work for me, unless you read time starting with seconds.
A pyramid is built bottom to top, not top to bottom. That’s also one of the strengths of the ISO format. You can add/remove layers for arbitrary granularity and still have a valid date.
Yeah, but people read top to bottom. The best way to do it would be to have upside down pyramids. With the biggest blocks at the top representing the biggest unit of time (YYYY) and the smallest blocks at the bottom representing seconds & smaller.
Offene Feldschlacht betritt den Raum
2025-01-26-11-40-20
I get it, just pyramids are misleading, also year-month-day is better because resulting number always grows. 😺
A bit out of context, but is your username and instance a reference to nescafe?
Not really but now that you mentioned it, it will! 😄
That’s an interesting coincidence
2025-01-26T11:40:20, you mean?
Yeah
Y’all be riskin it without holocene crypty
SYSM:YY.DM.TzYDY.H.H
4:40.42p EST on Jan 28, 12,025 ->
- 4120:20.21.-4285.1.6
That’s the one that was active when I started typing. However, I change it randomly using the decay of a radioactive isotope that is randomly chosen by the decay of a separate amount of Uranium-238. I’m two randoms in. This way, my time records are always encrypted using open-science source and the government can’t hack the pictures of my parking spots at the oncology center to sell them to the NIMBYs at MetAlphabet AI.
I don’t know why anyone would ever argue against this. Least precise to most precise. Like every other number we use.
(I don’t know if this is true for EVERY numerical measure, but I’m sure someone will let me know of one that doesn’t)
They are all equally prescise. American one is stupid just like their stupid ass imperial units. European one is two systems slapped together(since they are rarely used together and when they are its the iso format) and iso is what european standard should be.
You misunderstand my comment.
I’m saying the digits in a date should be printed in an order dictated by which units give the most precision.
A year is the least precise, a month is the next least, followed by day, hour, minute, second, millisecond.
You are looking not for precision but for largest to smallest, descending order. this is distinct from precision, a measure of how finely measured something is. 2025.07397 is actually more precise than 2025/01/27, but is measured by the largest increment.
And to address the argument on precision versus descending. I disagree. An instrument counting seconds is more precise than a machine counting minutes, hours, days, weeks, months etc… And that holds true through the chain. The precision is in the unit.
the unit is just a report of orientation, not magnitude. if you have a digital counter you are limited by the precision of the digital counter, not the units chosen. an analog measurement however is limited instead by other uncertanties. precision has, genuinely, no direct relationship to units. precision is a statistical concept, not a dimensional one.
We can debate this all day. And I can’t honestly say that I would take either side in a purely semantics argument.
But the wording comes directly from RFC3339 which is, to me, the definitive source for useful date representation.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt
5.1. Ordering
If date and time components are ordered from least precise to most precise, then a useful property is achieved. Assuming that the time zones of the dates and times are the same (e.g., all in UTC), expressed using the same string (e.g., all “Z” or all “+00:00”), and all times have the same number of fractional second digits, then the date and time strings may be sorted as strings (e.g., using the strcmp() function in C) and a time-ordered sequence will result.
They chose poor words for this.
Largest to smallest is also wrong. In 2025/01/28, the 28 is larger than the 01.
It should be “most significant” to “least significant”
largest to smallest is correct. 1 mile is larger than 20 meters. if i had specified numerical value or somesuch, maybe you’d be correct. though significance works as well.
Largest to smallest is at best ambiguous. It can refer to the size of the number itself, or the size of the unit.
There is a reason this exact concept in maths/computer science is known as the “significance” of the digit. Eg. The “least significant bit” in binary is the last one.
significance refers to a measurement certainty about a number itself, especially its precision! and is unrelated to the magnitude/scale. the number and dimension “2.5634 mm” has more significant digits than the number “5,000 mm”, though the most significant digit is 2 and 5 respectively, and least significant 4 and 5 respectively. this is true if i rewrite it as 0.0025634 m and 5 m. it does work for doing what you say in this case because a date is equivalent to a single number, but is not correct in other situations. that’s why i said it does work here.
largest to smallest increment is completely adequate, and describes the actual goal here well. most things are ambiguous if you try hard enough.
Sorting with either the month or the day ahead of the year results in more immediately relevant identifiable information being displayed first. The year doesn’t change very often, so it’s not something you necessarily need to scan past for every entry. The hour changes so frequently as to be irrelevant in many cases. Both the month and the day represent a more useful range of time that you might want to see immediately.
Personally, I find the month first to be more practical because it tells you how relatively recent something is on a scale that actually lasts a while. Going day first means if you’ve got files sorted this way you’re going to have days of the month listed more prominently than months themselves, so the first of January through the first of December will all be closer together then the first and second of January in your list. Impractical.
Year first makes sense if you’re keeping a list around for multiple years, but the application there is less useful in the short term. It’s probably simpler to just have individual folders for years and then also tack it on after days to make sure it’s not missing.
Also, like, this format is how physical calendars work assuming you don’t have a whole stack of them sitting in front of you.
By keeping years in different folders you are just implicitly creating the ISO format: eg.
2025/"04/28.xls"Well, not really. Sort of.
2025/“04-28-2025.xls”
You still want the year in the title format so you have it if it ends up on its own somewhere.
finally a correct version of this diagram
My stupid ass read this top to bottom and I was confused why anyone would start with seconds
All my homies hate ISO, RFC 3339 for the win.
YYYY.MM.DD HH.MM.SS, as eru ilúvatar intended
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
Ftfy
This is the way.
I often have to refrain myself from using ISO-8601 in regular emails. In a business context the MM/DD/YYYY is so much more prevalent that I don’t want to stand out.
Filenames on a share drive though? ISO-8601 all the way idgaf
I know, why don’t we all agree to agree and use every single possible format within a shared spreadsheet
Oh god it’s so true…
In one work report, I recorded the date as “1/13/25”, “13/1/25” and “13JAN2025”
I have my preference, but please for the love of all that is fluffy in the universe, just stick to one format…
“13.1.25”, not “13/1/25”.
Maybe in programming or technical documentation, but no, when I check the date I want to know the day and the month, beyond that, it’s all unnecessary information for everyday use, and we have it right in Europe.
You can’t change my mind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted by creator
just nitpicking, but technically ISO 8601 does not (currently) permit the omission of the year.
if information is to be omitted, it must be done in ascending order of significance, so you can omit, in order, seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
(if you omit the month, that’s just the year left so why bother with ISO 8601 lmao)
Fair
You can do 1-26
I don’t know what this means, also I don’t have to adhere to anything, the European format works perfectly well for me, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2025-01-26 so it’s 26.01. It’s easy to look up. All you need to know is that the date goes YYY-MM-DD (year -> month -> day). You do the same thing when you write 26.01 instead of 26.01.2025, since you are just dropping information about the year.
Starting out with “you can’t change my mind” is fine but then don’t argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked. Use whichever format you like better but don’t pretend that’s more than personal preference at that point.
The big argument for the iso date-time format is lexicographic ordering. If you don’t care about that, then don’t use it.
Just as a side-note: some european countries were in fact considering switching to the iso date-time format but didn’t because it would have been an inconvenience to people already familiar with different formats. Basically the “it’s better but people prefer the older format” thing we have going on in the comment sections right now.
Cheers
don’t argue for your point with arguments that can easily be debunked.
I literally said I don’t know what a thing means (and now that you’ve explained, it’s a useless instruction to give me, since all it does is add extra steps for those of us already perfectly happy with the European format lmfao), and made no assertion beyond my personal preference, kindly get off your fucking high horse.
1-26 or 01/26 is a way of writing the month and day. in this particular example, it is describing the 26th day of January, or January 26. the year is omitted in this instance because, in this context, it is a way of demonstrating how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance without fully adhering to ISO 8601 guidelines.
So it’s just adding the American format (which categorically does not demonstrate how a month and day can still be conveyed in order of significance, but literally the opposite) in to the mix and not providing any help or making things any simpler lol
Thanks for explaining, but if the person who introduced the 1-26 concept in to the conversation (and could have easily just said “MM/DD” to make their point significantly clearer), or the other person with their lecture are actually trying to change my, or anyone else’s mind, or make their personal preference more appealing to others, this (making things more complicated, when they are already perfectly straightforward, just not how they like it) isn’t the fucking way to do it lmmfao
