6 ms·
The headline took so long to parse. Middle-endian dates remain very confusing to everyone outside the USA.
by buro9 11y ago
The headline took so long to parse. Middle-endian dates remain very confusing to everyone outside the USA.
- wutbrodo 11y agoIs this really that difficult? I was born and raised in the US but have been traveling around the world for almost the last year and it gets easy REALLY fast to switch between them, especially when one of the interpretations is clearly incompatible (like in this case where there's no 14th month). I've had probably more than a 100 lodging and train and flight bookings and I've yet to find it confusing. Though I do think that it's stupid that we use middle endian dates. My habit has become to just put the unambiguous fullyear-month-day.
- falcolas 11y agoI imagine it's due to the lack of context. If you see the date 11/2/12, what date is it? If I'm in America, I assume that it's M/D/Y, making it November 2, 2012. If I'm not in America, then I assume it's D/M/Y, making it February 11, 2012. But if I'm on the internet, I have no fricking clue. I agree on the unambiguous version - as a side effect, it sorts very nicely.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoAnd if you're the genius somewhere in the neighboring thread using YY/MM/DD, it's February 12, 2011. Heuristically, "if it has slashes, it's USian mm/dd/yy, if it has dots, it's European dd.mm.yy, if it has dashes, it's ISOish yy-mm-dd, YMMV."
- stordoff 11y agoI can switch between them without issue, but (especially online) you don't always have the context needed to decide which to use. If I come across, say, "01/05/2016", unless I know the country of origin for the site, I have no idea if that is 2016 May 1 or 2016 Jan 5.
- kyriakos 11y agoVery hard actually. For me it takes an effort to understand US dates. On the other hand DMY and YMD feel completely natural.
- bcatanzaro 11y agoBlame the English language. "September 14th, 2014" is easier to say than "the 14th of September, 2014". The American style date reflects the English language, which is why it feels more natural to many of us native speakers.
- stordoff 11y ago"14th of September" would be the more common spoken form in the UK, and certainly sounds more natural to me.
- mattlondon 11y agoIn the UK "September 14th 2016" sounds totally unnatural and entirely weird. If you said it at school, the teachers would correct you. The "14th of September 2016" form is what 95% of English people would default to I reckon. Even Shakespeare used this form: "beware the ides of March" and not "beware the March ides" Of course no one would say "2016 September 14th" but hey that is another discussoon.
- lysp 11y agoAustralian here, "14th of September" sounds natural and would be what was taught and used here in general conversation.
- chrisan 11y agoYMD will feel natural to any programmer so that doesn't count, programmers like order :) How do you verbally tell someone the date in conversation? September 14th 2014 or 14th of September 2014 or simply 14 September 2014? Being in the US, the latter two feel long or awkward for me. Writing the date how we say it makes "sense" so I'm guessing outside the US dates are spoken differently?
- specialist 11y agoI use YYYY/MM/DD every where I can. My pointless, resolute insurrection to drag USA's calendaring into the 3rd millennium.
- sixothree 11y agoI couldn't agree more. It can be extremely confusing to parse unfamiliar date formats and iso 8601 is the only date format that is instantly understandable.
- dclowd9901 11y agoFree date sorting too!
- sleepychu 11y agoTill the year 10000
- dclowd9901 11y agoBetter put that in my reminders...
- rocky1138 11y agoStick with ISO 8601 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601): 2016-05-01.
- ScottBurson 11y agoYes. It's unambiguous to everyone, and it sorts correctly without special treatment.
- novaleaf 11y agohey, i'm with you. I date my things YYYYMMDD
- draw_down 11y agoGood lord, seriously?!
- jakobegger 11y agoI wish people would just spell out month names and use 4 digit years. Then you can use any order and it stays unambiguous.