Until microsoft makes that the default down in the lower right corner, I don’t think we’ll make much headway. I’ve been trying to get my office to do their dated files in YYYYMMDDHHMM for years. I do mine that way but I can’t get anybody else to comply. This meme lists that as a discouraged format, I guess the dashes are ISO but I don’t care about the dashes. I would accept doing YYYY-MM-DD over MMDDYYYY any time though.
The dashes make it far easier for regular humans.
All my coworkers now know that’s how dates work… I send out all of the reports and they can tear YYYYMMDD out of my arthritis-ridden hands
ISO 8601 recommends inserting a
Tbetween the calendar date portion and the time of day portion. So:20250501T2210+00.The Microsoft thing is entirely regional. It’s not that Microsoft does dates a certain way, it’s your regional defaults. I live in a country that does dates the ISO and the computer displays them thay way.
Someone once told me that american date format follows the same pattern as regular speech. Like "26th of April, 2004. It made some sense to me, but that still feels a silly reason to discard just the sorting benefits.
ISO 8601 allows all kinds of crazy time stamps. RFC 3339 is much nicer and simpler, and the sweet spot is at the intersection of ISO 8601 and RFC 3339.
Then again, ISO 8601 contains some nice things that RFC 3339 does not, like ranges and durations, recurrences…
2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
My goodness, some of the comments in here must come from people who thought that those writing the standard were morons who did no research.
I don’t think they’re morons…just slaves to convention and compatibility. Not many ways to get away from that and justify it.
I feel like YYYYMMDD (without dashes) might be a format in ISO 8601, but I’m fully expecting to be corrected soon. But I didn’t say think, I said feel. YYYYMMDD has a similar vibe to YYYY-MM-DD, ya feel me?
Nope, you are correct! From the Wikipedia page, which cites the standards document:
- Representations can be done in one of two formats – a basic format with a minimal number of separators or an extended formatwith separators added to enhance human readability. The standard notes that “The basic format should be avoided in plain text.” The separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the hyphen, while the colon is used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds). For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as “2009-01-06” in the extended format or as “20090106” in the basic format without ambiguity.
So xkcd got a detail wrong? I’m cancelling my subscription!
It is. Photos and code merges use it.
Stupid smarch 2nd
Feb 27th 2013
Boom. Everything is in a different format so you can order it however you want and it’s still readable.
Why use abbreviations in your preferred language when you can have a solution that is language-agnostic and universal (for a given calendar) ?
Because if there’s one problem simple enough that I trust an LLM or translation app not to fuck up, it’s simple translation of month labels from on language to another. If you’re writing in English, it’s reasonable to have month abbreviations in English. If someone wants to read it in a different language, they’re going to have to use translation software or hire a human translator to do it. And regardless of translation method, simple date translation will be among the most reliable and faithfully translated parts.
Or, you know, just use plain old numerals that almost everyone on earth can read and understand without needing a translation in the first place. Why the fuck do people need to bring LLMs where it’s not needed ? Is it to pump their NVDA stocks?
Is there an ISO standard for how to say, “I don’t agree with a very specific aspect of your politics, or a specific statement one of your political heroes made, for a very specific reason, but I’m not declaring myself at the extreme horrible kitten-eating end of whatever political spectrum you live in.”
“Policies that destroy the biosphere are discouraged.” — ISO-0000
I see he paid the Internet Cat Tax
Rich is right, since this is the date format that sorts correctly in filenames.
And it is easily extensible to YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to include the time of day
Are you an obsidian user?
I feel called out and I’m hiding in the bushes reading comments.
It’s called feeling seen and finding you’re not alone. Do you type "# " while screen sharing in work apps to no avail and the chagrin of colleagues? It’s okay. Me too.
Haha yep, you caught me. I’m a fan of the unique note feature
I’ve never met a fellow Templatr in the wild lol
My daily note broke and my life fell apart for a minute.
Have you also spent months building your Data Capture Workflow mermaid.js? 😅😬
Not quite months, but definitely weeks 😂 Obsidian can be such a rabbit hole. If I tweak that last template one more time, then I’ll finally be done, I swear!
So I’m like 80% done with my setup. Mostly focused on routine and habit templates, homepage wiki for pkm etc… between the plugins and css, no matter which device I’m on, it’s the slowest app I’ve ever used. This is why I pushed my old setup and started over clean with more knowledge. I don’t know how to get the customization I want without insane unusable lag
Who’s Rich? Did you mean Randall?
…dammit, the only comics I read are XKCD and OOTS and I done fucked up.
How can you sleep on Oglaf
The good ones tend to filter their way out.
(I do also read whatever John Allison is currently working on.)
Banished to back in time to hang with Ozy and Millie
Omg thank you!! Everyone sees my notes thinks I’m crazy for obsessing… It’s the correct fucking sort!
Won’t be true after 9999-12-31, however.
natural sort ftw
Oh no! The Y10K bug!
Can’t wait for the Y40k bug, when Tyranids begin to infect our brains.
Bold of you to assume there isn’t already a genestealer cult on Terra. Washington specifically.
That…would explain a lot
If humanity survives until then, we can implement 9-digit dates and delay the problem until Y100K.
Can be solved with a small shellscript adding a leading zero to all filenames with the format.
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don’t have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn’t strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as ‘2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf’) you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
It’s an easy fix at least, just check if you’re comparing numbers on both sides and switch to a simple numerical sort.
I think Windows used to get this wrong, but it was fixed so long ago that I’m not even sure now.
I bet you could make a one liner to rename files with YYYY-MM-DD to 0YYYY-MM-DD fairly easily. Not a problem.
If I, my software, or my data last this long, I will have nearly 8000 years to resolve it. Which is to say, the year 9998 is going to get busy.
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
I just don’t like to be forced to include the damn year everytime, and if you cut the year from ISO 8601 you get the american MM-DD order, which everybody hates.
I like DD/MM/YYYY. 🤷🏻♂️
If it’s just in casual conversation or emails DD/MM/YYYY is fine, but if you’re naming documents or something in a professional setting, you should really always include the year anyway.
Everyone should use date-time groups so we’re all on the same page down to the second.
DDHHMMSSZmmmYY
%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ
Upset we didn’t get a “Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago…”
It’s the only way.
There is still confusion to be had before 1582-11-29
This is the way.
