The fact that’s it’s an international standard is why I prefer yyyy-mm-dd, if we’re going to use numbers.
But this also leads me to a question: Dopers outside the US: does Discourse display Month #day on threads and posts of you, like it does for me? Or does it flip it around to #day Month?
It says Month #day, but it spells out the month so it isn’t confusing (May 17)
Sure, I could figure it out, but it was a bit jarring and caused me to mentally hiccup, as I had not seen that before.
If we are going to use numbers, that will be the format. I think the question is mostly whether to use all numbers or use letter abbreviations for months.
I’ve also seen September abbreviated as “Sept.” in writing out dates. Obviously, for standards purposes and the purposes of this messageboard, three-letter abbreviations, probably in all caps, would work best. Aesthetically, if I’m writing, I use “Sept.” as the abbreviation. (Like mentioned here for month abbreviations.)
That said, I like the ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd as being currently used.
Like @Cervaise and @pulykamell, I was an American living abroad for a long time. I found it extremely easy to adapt to the international methods of writing dates. Now that I’m back in the US, I have to force myself to write dates American style because I don’t want to seem pretentious or confusing.
My personal favorite style is “17 May 2022.” It’s unambiguous and separates the numbers which improves readability. I may just give in to my “pretention” and use that format for the rest of my life.
It shouldn’t be this. There’s no extreme character limit so you can definitely spare an extra 2 characters to improve readabilty: either 17 May 2022 or 17-May-2022 not 17May2022.
^Agreed. Use spaces or hyphens to delimit the parts of the date. Improves readability immensely.
It all comes down to the intended audience.
Right now I’m preparing things for an international audience, so I’m doing things with a written out month, to be completely unambiguous. Then I can do June 12, 2022; 12 June 2022; or 12 Jun 2022, and there is no confusion. The only issue I run into is that for some of my audience, 12 Jun 2022 is their 13 Jun 2022.
Americans (or people living in the US), then mm-dd-yyyy is fine, particular informally.
A computer, then definitely yyyy-mm-dd. I want to be able to do a search here and have it sort properly:
Instead of
Interesting; because this board starting just recently is, I’m pretty sure, the first time I’ve ever seen the year placed first. I always have to do a double or triple look at those dates to make any sense out of them.
However, wherever the year is placed, if it’s the only one with four digits then it’s obvious that it must be the year. The only thing that makes it immediately obvious which is the month is to use letters for the month. And putting the year first confuses my head enough that I can never remember which convention I’m supposed to be using for order of month versus day if they’re both numbers, so the only thing I can rapidly take from those dates in thread titles is the year.
Yeah, for anything formal, I write it the American way, but anything personal, I’ll use 2022 May 17 or 2022 - V - 17, just because.
Since the forum in which we post tragic breaking news stories is still called “Mundane And Pointless”, for consistency wouldn’t it be better if the date format were as counterintuitive as possible?
I use 5/17/2022 or May 17, 2022.
I suppose it could get confusing if it’s 6/4/2022. But I’m too old to change now.
It is in a forum like this, where we have people from all over. Writing out the month is always good.
Maybe mm - yy - dd - cc, so today could be 05-22-17-20?
40 years at Boeing, dates were always month/day/year. Measurements are in inches. Still good enough for me today, May 17, 2022.
I like yyyymmdd because I’ve never, ever, seen yyyyddmm.
Perhaps for the first 12 days of each month they should be written 11 May 2022 and then starting on the 13th, they get written as 05-13-2022. That eliminates confusion, and then everybody/nobody is happy.
If you are writing out the month name anyway then why not just use the regular US standard of May 17, 2022?
Canadian, worked with computerized accounting systems since (mumble), and have always used yyyymmdd for dates in any official context as well as for anything computer related, although I would normally use April 1, 2022 for a letter or other informal use. yyyymmdd (with or without punctuation) is the official Canadian standard, and if there is any ambiguity in a date (i.e. 01-04-2022 in a contract) the legal default is to read it as dd-mm-yyyy.
Note that using dd MMM yyyy only works well for speakers of your own language - would you easily understand 01 AVR 2022 (French), 01 KBI 2022 (Ukranian), or 01 अप्रैल 2022 (Hindi)?