Jan 09 2009
How about an unambiguous date?
Despite having studied in the USA for five years back in the ’90s, and despite having spent most of the past four years here with Kosh, sometimes, I still get the dates mixed up.
For example, I received a piece of mail today that bore some great news. I glanced at it, and noticed “Date of decision: 01/02/09“. “Oh,” I exclaimed, “that was fast, they made a decision on the 1st of February, and it already reached us!”
Kosh looked at me askance, and I looked back, blankly.
Okay, at this point it probably is good for me to note that I tend to be a bit scatterbrained at times, so yeah, it took me a few seconds to figure out why what I said didn’t make any sense. It is still January, after all!
The source of confusion (once you eliminate my scattered brain!) is the different format used by different countries for their calendar dates. A complete date contains three variables: the day (dd), month (mm) and year (yyyy). How many formats could there be? Let’s see…
- I was brought up using the dd-mm-yyyy format, used in Malaysia, Switzerland, and many (dare I say most?) countries of the world.
- The USA uses the mm-dd-yyyy format, along with a handful of other countries.
- I now use the yyyy-mm-dd format when naming almost all files relating to date-specific items, joining a select few countries like Sweden, Norway and South Africa.
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When you see a date written 15/9/2008 there’s no doubt it what day it’s referring to. When it’s written 6/7/08, then comes the challenge: 6th July, or June 7th?
In this day and age, when so much information is shared with so many people all over the world, it’s way too easy to forget that depending how you write your dates, the information might be interpreted wrongly.
How to make your dates unambiguous?
The simplest way is to spell out the month portion of the date. For example, write “January 9, 2009″ or “9 January 2009″ instead of 1/9/09 or 9/1/09. This will go a long way towards preventing any confusion. I use this all the time, even when filling up forms - those that don’t already have the date section primed with ” / / “, of course.
If for whatever reason you prefer not to spell out the month, then I highly recommend using the ISO 8601 standard for date representation (yyyy-mm-dd). I use this when naming my blog backup files, and identifying when a particular image was used on which blog. This convention also makes it so much easier to arrange your files chronologically! See the image on the right for a sample of how I do my filekeeping. Tidy, yes?
How about you, which date format do you prefer?
And just how freaky is my filekeeping system?
I favor the month-day-year format–it’s what I grew up with, after all. When I use day-month, I spell out the month. I’ve never used year-month-day, though I know how to look at it.
Then again, I use 24 hour time; I suppose that’s enough “How does this work again?” for the people around me.
Ravyn: I don’t understand how people have so much trouble with the 24-hr time system. Ugh. You poor thing! It’s the system used in Switzerland, and I’m used to it even though I don’t actively use it myself. On my first ever digital watch, back in high school, I chose for it to show 24-hr time. And guess what? People who looked at my watch for the time would ask “is your watch broken?”
EZ: “as if you were suing the month”?? haahahaaa I like that
I think they’re too lazy to subtract 12, is all. It makes for some good jokes; I once managed to slip a lesser punchline into a story based on the idea that someone interpreted 1700 as 7 pm. Honestly, I don’t see what their problem is; using 24-hour time would have solved so many problems with that one writing contest where the deadline’s never midnight (unless it’s “the minute between 11:59 one day and 12:01 the next) because nobody’s sure which day to call it or whether to say am or pm. If they’d just say “0000 on Month Day”, it’d take care of everything.
Still couldn’t figure some of these things such as blogger using the American style of date…Internet help us to learn
Ravyn: I’ve always had difficulty figuring out whether “12 am” or “12 pm” is noon or midnight. I immediately use “12n” or “12mn” instead.
Kruel74: Yup, blogger uses American style dates… which is why it’s so much better to choose one of the many date options that spell out the month - like that, no confusion!
Angie: Oh yikes, that certainly would be confusing! That would have required me to be extra vigilant when writing down a date, and when “interpreting” a date on whatever document. Yuck!
Monsoon: Grrr, another case of wikipedia not being correct! Thanks for setting me straight!
Mike: Despite being one of my neighbours, I did NOT know just how different Thailand had its date (and time) formats from others. How common is the (Buddhist) calendar? Because in Malaysia, while an eye is kept on the Muslim calendar, by and large everyone uses the Gregorian calendar.
The y/m/d format was the required format for nameing files on a project I worked on years ago. Its simply brilliant - if you start a file name with it will always sort the dir listing with the oldest first i.e. 20090115invoice etc
Hi Lis! Actually my introduction to the y/m/d format was also via a project at work… although there, the file naming convention had the date as the last bit of info in the filename… I immediately saw how useful it would be to have that date format as the *first* info of a filename… right now I use this system to keep track of all the images I use on my blogs