Bad dates

I decided that I shall continue on a pet peeve series... prepare to groan.

I HATE forms that have a date field with just 2 slashes in it (__/__/__) and no template.

Somewhere and sometime someone(s) decided that dates in the US should be written as the month followed by day followed by the year.

month day, year: MM/DD/YY(YY)

This doesn't make a lot of sense. You have the rapidest changing number in between the slower ones.

In Europe someone else decided that it should be day then month then year:

day month year: DD/MM/YY(YY)

This is slightly better, increasing order significance or resolution, though it's still wrong for reasons I will explain shortly.

The difference often causes some initial confusion and sometime moments of terror when I happen to be traveling abroad or to a lesser extent, looking at pages and services online based in Europe. The ambiguity is obvious for all days numberd 12 or less of course. (does 01/02/06 mean January 2 or February 1? depends...) Many companies realizing this have taken to writing the first 3 letters of the month instead of the number of the month which is a good thing though with all the languages might confuse some people. Some have even taken to smartly giving a template like the ones above.

This needs to change and thankfully in some communities of like-minded people it has started to, especially in the computer/internet world. What does it need to change to, you ask?


YYYY - MM - DD hh : mm . ss . tt
year - month - day (and then optionally) hour : minute . second . fraction_of_second

Basically date/time stamps should be consistently decreasing orders of resolution. Furthermore, the year should ALWAYS be 4 digits (at least for the next 7994 years)... Always... I mean, first of all, we're in the 21th century and still have to sometimes write dates from the last one. Even though we can cognitively disambiguate the last 2 digits by context, that is not always the case. Also, months should never be spelled by name. The Chinese have it right here. Their word for June transliterates to "month 6".

So getting back to the true format... why decending order instead of ascending (like in Europe)? Quite simple... because then the dates sort correctly. We're firmly entrenched in the electronic, internet, and information age. We deal with gobs and gobs of electronic files, collections, and whatnot, especially with digital cameras, all manner of electronic statements and such. The dates are often encoded in the filename. E.g. when I download a statement from my bank's website I get somethingn like NFCU041806.pdf. The problem here is that I have years of these things that I have to rename because they DON'T SORT CORRECTLY. Go by the time stamps? Can't always do that especially when the date sometimes screws up when copying/moving folders of stuff. Or sometimes I get behind in the downloading and have to get several months worth of stuff.

This also happens to me at work when I get a lot of collections with dates in the folder names like jajp042806... but I routinely convince the senders to switch the date around.

But think about it. It's easier to sort dates both visually and via computer when written as:

2006-04-18
1969-06-30
2006-01-01
1987-06-18

then as
04/18/06
06/30/69
01/01/06
06/18/87

But sadly, people are still attached to that old style. Even sadder, I have some programs that do auto-naming of all my scanned images and they also use this old style so my scans get all out of order. Bleh.

Update: 2006-04-18
For those interested there is a date spec called iso-8601 that codifies this for web pages and such.