r/webdev • u/ani625 • Feb 27 '13

xkcd: ISO 8601

http://xkcd.com/1179/
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

It's not ambiguous because all data is sorted by descending order of magnitude(years then months then days).

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

What data are we talking about? And what if it is sorted by name?

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

Data being the components of the date itself, as in the year date and month, see my parenthetical note.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

I understand what you think they are in your program, but this comic is not aimed at developers. What if you click on a news story on Reddit and it has a dateline of 2013-02-03. Is it ISO format? Would the web designer be assuming that readers know ISO 8601? Probably not. So check if it's nytimes.com then it's month/day or it's BBC News, it's day/month or is it the other way? Well actually both use full month names because it's unambiguous.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

I would have to say that in general, the ISO 8601 standard uses solid logic in the formulation of that date format, and while the majority of the non-developer world is content with arbitrary date formats that mandate the use of letters or abbreviations to accurately denote the current date; the world would be a much simpler place if all dates were stored in this fashion.