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It's not just about years, and it's already explained in the article. When I see the date "02/03" or "02/03/2021", I can't tell if it means "March the 2nd" or "
by progval 6y ago
It's not just about years, and it's already explained in the article. When I see the date "02/03" or "02/03/2021", I can't tell if it means "March the 2nd" or "February the 3rd", because websites and software don't consistently detect (or even care) about my locale.
But if the software show 2021-03-02, I unambiguously know which it is.
- systemvoltage 6y agoPoint noted. We weren't so globally connected just 20 years ago, so if you were in US, you were used to MM/DD format and if you were anywhere else, you were used to DD/MM format. It was all local.
- JdeBP 6y agoNonsense. People have been commenting on how these two orderings are confusing for far longer than 20 years. Things made in the United States have had worldwide circulation for quite a while, now. Even if one has WWW tunnel vision, Markus Kuhn's WWW page on ISO 8601 has been around since 1995.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fermienrico 6y agoIf you’re living in Berlin, it didn’t matter what US date format was 20 years ago. You’re missing the point that the globe is far more connected due to the internet.
- JdeBP 6y agoNo, you are missing the point that the globe was connected due to the Internet for far more than 20 years, as evidenced at least by the fact that one of the more widely known treatises on ISO 8601 on the World Wide Web dates from the middle 1990s. And that's merely the World Wide Web, not the worldwide computer networks and communications systems, where dates have been an issue, that pre-date the WWW. The idea that this issue is new because the world only got connected in the 21st century is baloney. Doubly so: The world got connected so that people in other countries saw each other's conventional date formats long before, and people have been discussing date format ambiguities for far more than 20 years.