Keith Devens .com

Entry 1674

The only date formats that should be allowed to be displayed anywhere:

"19-Mar-2002" (usually preferred)
"2002-03-19" (ISO 8601) (also see this)
Some form of "Tuesday, March 19, 2002", "Tue, Mar 19, 2002", "March 19, 2002", etc. (human readable)
And maybe RFC2822 dates: "Tue, 19 Mar 2002 03:56:54 -0500" (is it also valid to have the three letter time zone code instead of the offset from GMT?) Update, darn, I just realized that these dates aren't necessarily fixed width... that darn FWS!

Obviously things like 20020319 are ok for machines to read, but the formats above are the only ones people should be expected to read.

Notice that I specifically didn't include things like "3/19/2002". The date happens to be unambiguous, since "19/3/2002" is still clear, but the first 12 days of every month aren't. Since half the world uses "day/month/year" and we in America use "month/day/year", if I give you 4/1/02, what's the date? Is it April first or January fourth? No dates should ever be displayed in either format on the Internet.

Anything I forgot? Oh, one more pet peeve. Whenever you give a time, always try to include the time zone! People on the Internet don't necessarily know where you are. And don't get me started on Beats (Sorry, "Internet time" - how pretentious).

And why people like stuff like "1998-05-12T14:15Z" (with the T in the middle) I'll never understand (maybe for machine readability?), although I don't mind the 'Z' (Zulu (zero) time - meaning UTC or GMT)

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 1674

04:03 (utc-5)
edited: 12:27 (utc-5)