YYYY-MM-DD gang rise up!
ISO 8601. This is the way.
For naming in file names yes.
For every mention of any date ever.
Even when talking to your friends.
When’s your birthday?
2025-11-23
<1993-11-23+1y>
(repeating timestamp)
Surely you mean
R/1993-11-23/P1Y?oh wow, did not know that had a spec!
I was referring to:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.htmlAnd I don’t know enough about orgmode!
I may need to add it to my comparison of formats: https://webcoder.info/recurrence.html
very nice website!
For naming the person your dating no
Any answer other than ISO 8601 is a red flag
RFC 3339 has less ambiguities, see https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
Sure, but that’s also iso8601:
This document defines a date and time format for use in Internet protocols that is a profile of the ISO 8601 standard
What exactly does it mean to be a “profile” of ISO-8601?
I’m just making it up as I type, but I’d say it’s within the iso frame but more specific
RFC3339 allows certain things that ISO8601 doesn’t, like leaving out the T
Right … what makes it a “profile” exactly?
From what I can find they define a profile as
profile - subset of features described in a standard or a set of standards
How is it a subset if it actually contradicts the standard? ( by using a space instead of T or no separator between date and time)
Yeah, I prefer a space or underscore instead of the T, much easier to read.
What a lovely webpage.
Turns out I’m an RFC 3339 guy through and through. I thought I was ISO 8601, but I’m just not. Every so often you learn something new about yourself. Today is one of those days.
I mean, I have no end of respect for all those good ISO 8601 people out there, but if it’s not in RFC3339, it’s not for me. Unless it’s that ambiguous but pretty stuff that’s only in the html living standard bubble.
YYYY-MM-DD
:hh:mm:ss optional
I agree. What is the point of dating things if they aren’t in order when done.
Sometimes it’s just about the sex.
You date people and leave them in the wrong order?! Cheater.
Well done!
Also makes it easier to sort
Exactly! I generate a frack-ton of excel reports at work, and I output them in the format Subject-Report-2025-09-01.
And on another note, when you’re traveling through the time Continuum, do you ask the nearest person for the day and month first? Nope, it’s always “what year is it?!” because you’re probably being chased by futuristic terrorists or super soldiers…
You, I like you.
YYYY/MM/DD is good for file locating in a single folder.
And YYYY-MM-DD if you’re all in one level because there are far fewer files.
This is the way
this is the way
This iso the way
Exactly, combining chronological and lexicographic order perfectly.
deleted by creator
I just do YY/MM/DD. It is highly unlikely someone is looking at those files a century later.
And now I feel old. 😞
I’m old too, but I don’t have files from the last century.
Even so, the next 90s are still a looong way to go. I am going to be ashes by then…
Filed my first taxes in 1999 so I am forever a cursed YYYY entity.
Prepared for 2100
Use ISO 8601 or get out.
Except, don’t actually use ISO 8601 because the T in the middle looks stupid.
You’re in luck! The
Tis optional provided you include separators between your hours, minutes, and seconds!hmmm… but without a T you get
2025-09-0119:42
0119 looks weird.
ISO 8601 FTW
I didn’t get erect by that wiki, but it moved slightly
Found the wikisexual.
ISO 8601 is the only true answer.
YYYYMMDD is the best. Easiest to sort.
you forgot this: –
No
YYYY-MM-DD is easiest to sort, won’t break in the year 10000 and is easy for humans to read quickly.
If you add a fifth digit it’s going to break sorting no matter what. Assuming you don’t go back and add a 0 to all the 4 digits.
Yeah, and we’ll all be dead, so it’s a silly point for me to raise, but it’ll be far clearer with dashes.
Also if you accidentally omit a leading zero with the dashes, it’s always unambiguous to fix, not so without.
Anyway, why not make it easier for the humans to read the date? Humans are the only ones who it affects. The computer doesn’t care what order the filenames are in or what the numbers in the filename signifies.
Because I’m already used to the format. 🙂 It’s selfishness.
She must hate that he doesn’t prefer YYYY/MM/DD
I don’t like the slashes, as hand written they can appear as a 1.
Edit: also slashes mess with file names, gotta use escape characters
YYYY-MM-DD for electronic sorting.
DD-MMM-YYYY for everything else.
Edited to add: it is wild to me that people downvote someone else’s opinion about something so mundane.
The 1st of September, year of our Lord 2025 AD.
AD means “in the year of our lord”.
It’s a very lordly date
September 1st, 1981 AD, 12:01PM and 5 seconds, 35 feet west of Paris, Wisconsin on the Horizon
I think using three digits for the month is a bit confusing. :)
I don’t like DD-MM-YYYY. I think it should be DD.MM.YYYY. This way you can distinguish between the date formats in those cases where people only use two digits for the year. Hyphen as a seperator means year in front, a dot means year at the end. And a slash implies the bad format.
I usually see MMM as an indicator for the three letter month abbreviation, useful for when humans are reading it (since it makes it all that much more difficult to misinterpret)
useful for when humans are reading it
I was sharing a meme about how absurd our time-related names are: days of the week named after the sun, then the moon, then a bunch of Nordic gods, and then the Roman god Saturn, and then months named after some Roman gods, then some Roman leaders, then some numbers that don’t actually correspond to their placement in our calendars.
And my Chinese coworker was like “dude that’s why our days of the week and months of the year are just the numbers, where January is something like ‘month one’ and Monday is something like ‘day one.’” Seems like a good system to me, honestly.
That makes sense. The three letter month abbreviation is unusual in Germany, so that idea didn’t cross my mind.
When I’m writing dates for work I always use the three letter month abbreviation (01-Sep) because it is totally unambiguous, doesn’t matter what country or time recording system that gets forwarded on to, they know what date I meant and can’t slip-slide out of it with an “oopsie date format” excuse!
MMM is a three letter abbreviation, like Jan or Mar or Sep.
MM.DD.YYYY is illegal. It’s random. Just sort by how big the time unit is and get DD.MM.YYYY
If you want it to be analogous to other numbers, YYYY-MM-DD makes more sense - from largest unit to smallest. We don’t say e.g. 1024 metres as “24 metres and 1 kilometre” either.
deleted by creator
Oh I learnt French in high school and it was pure insanity xD
“ninety” = “four twenty ten” 🥴
Random would be (e.g.) DY-MYYD-MY
That doesn’t sound random to me.
fixed, check again
I didn’t spot the three Ms at first.
03-Sep-2025. I don’t like it, but I forgive it because at least it’s unambiguous, unlike some other date formats that aren’t YYYY-MM-DD we could mention.
downvoted for whining, not for your opinion. just to clarify :p
Be baffled is whining?
If you are going to provide a separate format for readability, make it
ddd MMM dd, yyyy! Day of week is quite relevant to humans.
RED FLAG! RED FLAG!!!
YYYY.MM.DD_HH24MI.SS
e.g.
2025.09.02_1830.33
you know EXACTLY when the timestamp is referring to.
remove the time part you still got a pretty clean date 2025.09.02 which is also computer sort friendly.
the only missing component is the Timezone which I find pretty stupid TBH, because as a big Space Sci-fi fan, there needs to be a universal timecode system which is universal in the literal sense. Well technically it can never be, relativity and all, but you get what I mean…
also while we are at it, we should start teaching kids 12 digit number system, so that we get rid of the pesky decimal with a more efficient duodecimal.
Oooh, and make year 13 months with each month exactly 28 days, and the fractional remainder at the end of solar cycle is just a blackout timescape that nobody acknowledges collectively throughout the world.
This got increasingly unhinged and I support all of it.
False, it doesn’t include the timezone information ISO datetime is best, at the time og writing that would be 2025-09-03T10:10:30Z
The only correct answer is Unix timestamps.
If you’re not providing your date information with millisecond precision, are you even trying at that point?
DD-YYYY-MM
Because it can be pronounceable as damn.
YMMV
Sounds like a good reason to change your language to be compliant with ISO 8601.
annnnnnnd that’s enough lemmy for the day
