7 ms·
Took some time to realise that "Available 9.25" meant 25th September. The box looked more like a disabled button.
by nu11p01n73R 9y ago
Took some time to realise that "Available 9.25" meant 25th September. The box looked more like a disabled button.
- smcleod 9y agoYes, American dates are confusing and illogical at the best of times, I wish America would standardise on the international ascending order date style of 25/09/2017.
- petercooper 9y agoI hope we'd all standardize on the opposite: 2017-09-25.. it sorts properly when used in file and document names :-)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoand there is no ambiguity, does 6/7/2017 mean 6th July or 7th June?
- petercooper 9y agoYeah, I thought about that as I was writing my comment and realized that's why I always write "back to front dates" with dashes instead of slashes. I think it's probably because I always use that format in filenames and slashes feel like a very bad idea there ;-)
- ninjaoxygen 9y agoYes, it would be so great if there could be a standard for dates formatted this way. It would have to be called something awesome like ISO 8601! ;-) That is definitely also my preferred format, everything just sorts naturally then. Not so in love with the 2017-09-25T12:00 format as it does not work for filenames on my OS.
- lifthrasiir 9y agoISO 8601 supports an alternative format without separators, like 20170925T1200.
- linuxlizard 9y agoObligatory XKCD. https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/ ISO8601 is very nice.
- chuckwnelson 9y agoI love the tongue-in-cheek alt text.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoThere definitely still is ambiguity if you're unfamiliar with the format. Show someone "2017-07-06" and they still might be unsure whether that's June or July.
- mirimir 9y agoIf you have enough examples, you can see which field goes over 12. In undocumented datasets, that's the only option.
- kbart 9y agoI have never seen YYYY-DD-MM format, on the other hand, both DD/MM/YY and MM/DD/YY are equally common, that's why I always prefer YYYY-MM-DD format as it is the least ambiguous and most useful (sorting files etc., as other comments have mentioned). Feel free to prove me wrong though.
- robin_reala 9y agoHave you ever been to any of Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal or Turkmenistan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian.2C_year-day-month_.28YDM.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian.2C_yea...
- kbart 9y ago
- mrmondo 9y agoYes that’s a huge problem and I’ve seen a lot of misunderstands from it.
- nsomaru 9y agoI always read that as 6th of the 7th, 2017. I like American dates for sorting though :)
- rbanffy 9y agoAnd all on UTC, please. End this timezone and daylight saving nightmare.
- dkersten 9y agoYes! If I were dictator of the universe, this would be my first (and possibly only) change. I'd also like metric time, but abolishing timezones and daylight saving would be more than good enough.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThat would be my dream too :)
- q-base 9y agoFunny, I never thought about that :) And coming from Denmark I would always have recommended the exact reverse.
- dingdingdang 9y agoHonestly, the 2017-09-25 format is the only way forward for automatic proper sorting of folder/files..etc.
- gglitch 9y agoAnd it can be extended down to arbitrary units. 2017-09-25 2017-09-25-0929 2017-09-25-09290000000000
- nu11p01n73R 9y agoI am not sure if its the American date format or the way they choose to write them (with the . instead of - or /) made it confusing to me. On Indian website it is written "Available 26.9"
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoThat's a great point; I get the appropriate date formats whether I look at the default site or the UK 'mirror'.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoOr just use an unambiguous format especially when writing normal copy. It would only take a few extra characters to write it as "25th Sep" or "Sep 25".
- wildrhythms 9y ago+1, I'm not sure why people make their dates needlessly ambiguous. Writing out an abbreviated month removes any potential confusion.
- mirimir 9y agoI'm a '2017-09-25' fan, myself :) Given that I read from left to right, I mean.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> international ascending order date style of 25/09/2017 I don't believe that's an international style? "Since 1996-05-01, the international format yyyy-mm-dd has become the official standard date format, but the handwritten form d. 'month name' yyyy is also accepted (see DIN 5008)." (ISO8601)
- jlgaddis 9y agoI'm holding out for ISO8601 and UTC.
- walshemj 9y agoISO Dates would be better
- mantas 9y ago25/09/2017 would be no better than 9.25. Both are equally confusing.
- allenbrunson 9y agoargh! i can't believe people are still arguing about whether we should do MM/DD/YYY or DD/MM/YYYY or anything similar to that. here's how you should write a date that you are going to show to a user: Jan 11 2016 if you accept that premise, it doesn't matter (much) what order you put the elements in, because none of them can be confused with any other. a word is a month, a one- or two-digit number is the day of the month, a four-digit number is the year. i feel the same way about websites that expect me to input phone numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc without punctuation or spaces. why are you making this my problem? if your backend requires that, then strip out everything i typed that wasn't a digit and do your own formatting. geez.
- kuschku 9y agoDon’t you mean 11. Jan 2016? ;)
- allenbrunson 9y agothat way would work fine, too. i can look at that and tell what date we are talking about at a glance. the real problem is displaying both the month and the day of the month as one- or two-digit numbers, which leads to ambiguity. display the month as a three-character string, and the year as a four-digit number, and we are all on the same page again.
- kuschku 9y agoActually it doesn’t, there’s standards for that. YYYY-MM-DD DD.MM.YYYY MM/DD/YYYY Notice the separators. Except for parts of Japan and Australia, these are international standards and used everywhere.
- allenbrunson 9y agoit's pretty obvious that, if those standards were being followed all the time, we wouldn't be having this conversation. i am talking about an ad hoc, fairly simple thing one can do, if one is writing user-facing code. it's a rule i follow, and i offered it up as something other people might want to try as well.
- jkoll 9y agoThe ISO standard is YYYY-MM-DD...
- bigtones 9y agoThey even change date formats within the same section of the website, so no consistency at all. They use a slash in their date "9/25" for a Beats offer at the bottom of https://www.apple.com/mac/ https://www.apple.com/mac/
- wmeredith 9y agoI agree. The faux-button is a pretty inexcusable piece of interaction design. It's like underlining for emphasis on the web. Don't do it.