5d ago

ISO 8601 ftw rule

!iso8601@lemmy.sdf.org gang, rise up

139 comments

"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
  
  Meh. It's getting a lot of hate here, but I think it works well in casual short term planning. Context (July) - > precision (15).
  If I want to communicate the day in the current month, I just say the day, no month.
- Keep that kinda talk up and you'll go straight to tariff!

MM ≠ MM !!!

I work with international clients and use 2025-01-26 format. Without it.. confusion.
- That's an ISO date, and it's gorgeous. It's the only way I'll accept working with dates and timezones, though I'll make am exception for end-user facing output, and format it according to locale if I'm positive they're not going to feed into some other app.

I use ss/mm/hh/dd/MM/YYYY
t.european

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.

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. 😺
  
  2025-01-26T11:40:20, you mean?

finally a correct version of this diagram

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.

I just use millis since epoch
(Recently learned that this isn't accurate because it disguises leap seconds. The standard was fucked from the start)

I'm almost 40 and now just realizing my insistence on how to structure all my folders and notes is actually an ISO standard. Way to go me.
- I stumbled upon it years ago because sorting by name sorts by date. There was no other thought put into it.
  
  It's incredibly annoying that in clinical research we are prohibited from using it because every date must comply with the GCP format (DD mmm yyyy). Every file has the GCP date appended to the end.

YYYY.MM.DD HH.MM.SS, as eru ilúvatar intended
- YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
  Ftfy
- I think I went to high school with that guy.

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.
- All my homies hate ISO
  Said no-one ever?
  EDIT: thanks for informing me i now retract my position
  
  Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).
  Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.
  In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601
  
  if i am not wrong, it is because essentially both are same (slight differences in what is allowed and what is not, https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601), but RFC is more free as in freedom

This is the way.

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...

Mmm US military date and time is fun too.
DDMMMYYYYHHMM and time zone identifier. So 26JAN20251841Z.
So much fun.
- So virtually human unreadable and the letters make machine readability a pain in the ass?
  
  Honestly look very readable to me, though I'm not sure on the timezone bit. Maybe they left it out? Ohterwise it's 26th of January 2025, 18:41
  It's gonna be problematic when there's 5 digit years, but other than that it's... not good, but definitely less ambiguous than any "normally formatted" date where DD <= 12. Is it MM/DD or DD/MM? We'll never fucking know!
  Of course, YYYY-MM-DD is still the king because it's both human readable and sortable as a regular string without converting it into a datetime object or anything.
  
  As my friend used to say, there's dumb and then there's Army Dumb.

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

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)_/¯
- You can’t change my mind.
  That's not a good thing. That attitude limits you from improving how you do things because you've gotten emotionally attached to some arbitrary ... never mind. Have a nice day.
- These people are just too far into the ISO rabbit hole. I completely agree with you that DD.MM.YYYY is the best format for everyday use.
  
  the "best" format for everyday use is each individual person's personal preference.
  you may be more used to DDMMYYYY due to culture, language, upbringing, and usage. in the same vein, i am more used to YYYYMMDD because in chinese we go 年月日 (year-month-day), and it makes organizing files and spreadsheet entries much more intuitive anyways.
  
  Nah. Sort that alphabetically and you end up with a useless list.
  
  Thank you! 😂
  E: I even said how I can see it being useful in some applications, but fuck, if I'm looking at the date it's almost certainly to see what day it is today, what day (and maybe month) an appointment is, what day some food is going off, stuff like that. I know what month and year it is right now, and if I want to know the time, I look at a clock, not a calendar. If they love extra and often unnecessary information so much they're free to use whatever format they want, but I'm good, and so are many others, and they just need to learn to be ok with that lmao

i never saw year first in Europe.
- You're reading the post backwards.

Hot take: 2025-Jan-27 is better than 2025-01-27 in monolingual contexts.
- The beautiful part of 2025/01/27 is that it can inherently be sorted without formatting.

This is Belize and Micronesia erasure.

DD-MMM-YYYY master race
- Don't you mean: "Right there! Stop you, I'm going to."
  Yoda-ass date structure.
  What day, of what month, of what year is it? It's ordered by importance dammit!
- Wrong format. DD.MM.YYYY.
- That's what my work uses

Let's do it!

Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
- Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
  For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.
  And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right?
  Because it's the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It's first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.
  ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
  Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder
  
  Arent there uses other than ordering files?
  The ISO standard is best for ordering files, but that doesnt mean its good for other things
  Its impossible to confuse it with the other 2 presented in this post so you could use it for files and use another one for other things
  Edit: i may have been misunderstanding the context in which the ISO standard is claimed to be superior
- Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
  Maybe it's not least important for everyone?
  Almost like the preference can change depending on application...
  If I'm looking at a folder full of spreadsheets, one each month (or even day) for several years, and they are all titled according to YYYY-MM-DD. All you need to do is sort by filename and now you have it broken down by year, into one spreadsheet per month/day.
  And only needed to click one button to sort them into an easily readable format.
- I often see the year being the most important in my archive. Followed by month, then day (which is often left out because the document is monthly).
  And the why; because it sorts alphabetically.
- Well you read the least frequently changing part first, the year, because if you read the seconds first, then the thing's already changed before you've even finished reading it. /s
  
  What about evenly distancing the 3 shortest time intervals to promote fast reading
  mm:DD:MM:ss:YYYY:hh
- You can skip the year and just do 1-26
  
  Sometimes you need the year

How is day smaller than month? There are up to 12 values for month, but up to 31 for days
- It's sorted by the length of time, so a day is shorter than a month.
- obvious troll is obvious

139 comments