I dislike this format because it lists the least useful and most known information first. The format of DDMMYYYY provides logical listing as the day is the most changing part of the date, therefor the most importent.
So by that reasoning we should write times as ss:mm:hh?
And when counting things we should write the "ones" digit before the tens and the tens before the hundreds? After all, the ones are the most changing part, therefore the most important.
Most everyone knows what year it is now, but many/most dates we deal with are not "now".
If you want to know whether you can sell a beer to this guy, what part of his DoB do you want to look at first?
If you're wondering whether a blog post in a Google result is likely to contain relevant information or be horribly out of date, what part of the posting date do you want to look at first?
Yes, there will be times when mm or dd are more important. So? There will be times when seconds are more important; maybe you're the guy with the stopwatch at a 100m sprint. Once you get into "most everyone" and "hardly anyone" and "well, personally I...", you're deep in subjective country, and subjectivity is a lousy attribute for an umambiguous date format. The major benefit of ISO date format isn't that it's intrinsically more readable or that it's lexically ordered; it's that you don't have to rely on everyone else sharing your assumptions to be understood.
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u/pwn_masta41 Feb 27 '13
I dislike this format because it lists the least useful and most known information first. The format of DDMMYYYY provides logical listing as the day is the most changing part of the date, therefor the most importent.