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ISO 8601

ISO 8601 is an international standard for representing numeric dates. And I'm in love with it. Why? Read on!

As you are probably aware, different countries use different ways of expressing a numeric date. For example, 04-12-03 would mean 4 December 2003 here in the UK, whereas in the US it would be taken as 12 April 2003 (or should that be April 12 2003?). If someone writes that date, how can you to be sure which it is, or if it even is one of those formats? Furthermore, how do you know that the 03 refers to 2003 and not 1903? You can't be sure. This can lead to confusion, annoyance and perhaps worse, depending on the exact use of this vague date format.

There are further problems with such a date format where computers are concerned. A computer program has even less chance of understanding 04-12-03 than you do. If the code isn't explicitly expecting your obscure format then it will likely fail, or go on to cause problems later if it interprets it wrongly but accepts the input. Another issue with numeric date formats on computers is in alphanumeric sorting on a filesystem. If you label a file with the date 04-12-03.txt, another as 02-07-04.txt and a third as 07-12-01.txt, they will not sort in chronological order because the computer will sort them as if they were one big number.

All of these problems, to a lesser or greater degree, have bothered me over the years. The differing order of day and month in different parts of the world is a constant irritation, and the lack of chronological alphanumeric sorting for computer file and folder names has at times annoyed me greatly. And all these issues are, explicitly or otherwise, solved by ISO 8601.

ISO 8601 is representing a numeric date with YYYY-MM-DD. That's it. Or rather, that's the calendar date part of it, which is the best bit. In YYYY-MM-DD, the date I am writing this is 2005-10-22, which is (wait for it...) 22 October 2005.

Is it odd to be in love with an ISO standard? Probably. But it is one I feel a close connection with because I thought up the format of YYYY-MM-DD for my own use several years before I found out it was an ISO standard. The standard also specifies the 24-hour clock for time, which is something else I've always supported. Like kilos compared to pounds, ISO 8601 dates and times just make a lot more sense.

So that's the story of why my website uses YYYY-MM-DD dates. Got opinions? Then let me know what you think about all this.

Links

ISO 8601 - Numeric representation of date and time - The International Organization for Standardization page about ISO 8601

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