For me, the best reason to keep dates in the format of: YYYYMMDD is that if you name your files in this way, when you do a directory list, files get sorted in alphabetical order So if only for this reason, this is why its the ONLY convention I will ever use, even if I decide to learn a third language. For those who care, being in French Canada, its very important that the date be labelled in the following format DDMMYYYY For the last 10 years, I have abandoned this way of dealing with dates, and I am through about 70 people at the office now, teaching them why it make sense to name files in the format of YYYYDDMM Regards, -=Francois=- On 2010-03-13, at 10:17 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > > > --On Saturday, March 13, 2010 07:51 -0700 Cullen Jennings > <fluffy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> I just got abused by someone reading the IESG web pages and >> pointing out dates like 2010-01-02 , are confusing. Is there a >> better way to do dates that we should be using on the ietf.org >> web pages? > > First of all, while there have been many efforts to make that > ambiguous, there really is an international standard that > specifies dates in strict little-endian order (e.g., YYYYMMDD) > with optional delimiters (hyphen is now specified, but period > and maybe some other things were, if I recall, permitted in > earlier versions of the standard). Because of national > conventions, variations, and plain stupidity, all [other] > formats suffer from at least one of three problems: > > (1) Dependency on particular languages, e.g., 1 Jan 2002. > > (2) Visual confusability of particular characters in > common fonts, e.g., 1 II 2010 could easily be > mistaken, with the wrong choice of fonts, for 1 11 2020. > (Curiously, while the appearance of Roman numerals most > often indicates a month, I've occasionally seen the > equivalent of XXI 1 2010 and its permutations in the > wild.) > > (3) The permutation problem, which gets particularly > severe if two-digit years are used, and which is the > source of the ambiguity you point out. > > IMO, if we have a problem (and, if members of the community are > confused, we probably do), the best solution is a short note on > relevant pages (perhaps even in the footer of every page) that > says, e.g., "In accordance with International Standards, all > dates on IETF web pages are either spelled out in full or in ISO > 8601 format, i.e., YYYY-MM-DD". It is not trying to swap out > one ambiguous format for another one that might be slightly less > (or slightly more) ambiguous. > > john > > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf