I agree with Iljitsch's earlier point: In this day and age, if one is not sure how to interpret 2010-01-02 at first glance, he should have no trouble figuring it out right away. We would expect people who are interested in IETF material to have the curiosity to find out, wouldn't we? What I am not so sure about is the sweeping statement that Americans would likely have difficulties with the 'yyyy-mm-dd' format. I walked around the office and polled seven of my co-workers who happen to be around (all engineers by trade, five 'natives'), all seven (eight including me) _know_ what it means. Microsoft Windows already allow options to customize 'short date' presentation in all locales that I spot-checked, one of them is 'yyyy-mm-dd'. Perhaps this really is a non-issue after all? Jerry -- Jerry Huang, AT&T Labs, +1 630 719 4389 > -----Original Message----- > From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of > Iljitsch van Beijnum > Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 11:19 > To: MEMcNeil@xxxxxxxxx > Cc: Yao Jiankang; ietf@xxxxxxxx Discussion > Subject: Re: What day is 2010-01-02 > > On 17 mrt 2010, at 17:02, Michael Edward McNeil wrote: > > >> (Although the exposure to non-standard ways of doing things may make this > harder for Americans.) > > > Since Americans habitually use month-day order anyway, why would YYYY-MM- > DD be especially difficult for them? It's Europeans and others who > typically use day-month order that would seem likely to incur difficulties - > - except that putting the year first is a pretty glaring clue that the order > shouldn't be regarded as it usually is for them. > > Absolutely. But Americans don't expect this kind of stuff to make sense, > because they're used to having a different way of measuring everything, > while in the rest of the world we're used to the metric system so we assume > things make sense. So an American wouldn't necessarily consider yyyy-dd-mm > inconceivable while people from elsewhere probably would and just assume > yyyy-mm-dd. > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf