A Reasonable Rant on Date Formatting

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 11:34:06 -0600

If you live in the United States, the standard date format y ou are familiar with looks something like this: MM-DD-YYYY

If you live in Europe, the standard date format you are familiar with looks something like this: DD-MM-YYYY

Both of these are flawed--the United States being the worst format of the two. To improve this format let us first agree on two points:

  1. If you live in the US or Europe, it is highly likely that you read from left to right.
  2. It is easier to take in data from general to specific.

Keeping these two things in mind, let us organize what I would call "time meta-data" from most general to specific.

A.D./B.C.E. > Year > Month > Day > Hour > Minute > Second

So, with the above in mind plus our two agreed upon points, a better date format would look something like the East Asian preferred format:

YYYY-MM-DD

What's nice about this format is the reader will not need to re-contextualize the date as they are reading it. What I mean by this is that there are many repeated days and months, but the year is unique, so starting with the year sets the stage for the rest of the date. Thus after they read the first element of the date it is immediately known which year the month and day belong to. The other two formats are more ambiguous. They have to reach the end of the line before knowing what year the month and day belong to. Then the reader sees the month, and finally the day which belongs to the month they just read.

Okay, this is quite pedantic, but let's think about this from the perspective of how we talk.

"What's the date today?"
"I think it's the third."
"Yeah, but what month?"
"It's June."
"What year?!"
"3000 AD."

If I ask someone what day it is, there are two inferred pieces of information that come first: they are asking about the current year and the current month of the current year. Thus our though process, unconscious as it is, is the same as the YYYY-MM-DD format.

I will concede the point that people say dates in all different ways in English. We can say 06/03 the following ways:

I think it's clear though that "June 3rd" is easier and more common to say even if it's less formal.

Therefore the YYYY-MM-DD date format is the most intuitive approach to dates as it is closer to how we speak about dates than the other two systems which are annoying and confusing.

Now an observant person might point out that the time stamp for this article (located under the title) is in fact no in my preferred format. Alas, I wish it could be, but my date formats must comply with the RSS/XML standard for RSS feed readers, so I have a practical reason why my favored date format is not used on my site.