Can we please, please – PLEASE! not make the nonsensical US date format month/day/year the default in applications? 🤦♂️
PRE 👏 TTY 👏 PLEASE
And to all users of that format: it makes no sense, it's counter-intuitive, it makes collaboration frustrating, it introduces inconsistencies and errors... Just stop. Please. Use international standards.
(And don't get me started on your other units of weights, volumes and distances. Bloody hell.)
Boost if I'm right.
@stragu YESSSSSS SO MUCH THISSSSS.
@stragu yyyy.mm.dd or go home
JaJa 
@stragu YMD or DMY. MDY is cursed
@stragu I use YY/MM/DD since lexicographical order and chronological order coincide.
Not between 1999 and 2000
It's also not strictly unambiguous with DD/MM/YY the way that YYYY-MM-DD is
@stragu you’re correct insofar as asserting that this is a bad practice. incorrect insofar as assuming you will get americans to care.
@stragu and display timezones as GMT+nn, I have absolutely no w@#$@#$ idea why central mountain time is!
@ajft @stragu To stay neutral then UTC is probably better than GMT, see https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html ; this also avoids the AM/PM format that is just confusing, like all timezones abbreviations when they are not of the format "Continent or Country/City" (sometimes even a state in the US can have 2 legal timezones at the same time, depending on the city you are in)
Small reminder : https://xkcd.com/1179/
@stragu "American date format, invented by me it was" (Yoda)
Also abandon feet, miles, inches, pinches, furlongs, gallons and other archaic and confusing units.
@stragu my ranking of best formats:
1. UTC unix time (for APIs and stuff)
2. ISO 8601
3. everything else
@stragu ISO-8601 YYYY-MM-DD only. The euro DD-MM-YYYY is the worst, it sorts by day. At least the US one sorts by month, then day, so a 1-year archive is correct.
#date #iso8601 #hasaposse
@mdhughes @stragu As someone else mentioned in some other part of this tree of posts.
It's probably based on language. In US people when they communicate dates they seem to tell it in the order of MM-DD-YYYY while in at least two countries that I'm aware of in EU we're saying it in the order of DD-MM-YYYY, which is part of how the spoken language works.
@stragu
month/day/year - American
day/month/year - European
year/month/day - International
@stragu
Oookayyy, an when should they start it ?
On 12AM or 12PM
@stragu I need more accounts here to boost this. Like a few thousand more.
☕
@stragu I lived here for most of my life at this point and it still makes no freaking sense.
@stragu
that made me check if #Niantic had fixed their US-centric date format in #PokémonGO, which I'd reported as bug #feedback to them a while ago: https://mastodon.social/@FiXato/104371032452675323
Which it looks like they did!
I mean, sure, it isn't #ISO8601, but at least the catch dates are now displayed in the device #locale, rather than whichever developer's or team lead's preferred format, which make it *my* choice, which is a win in my book.
@stragu
oddly enough it still seems to work on all phones or accounts, as my wife's is still showing that ridiculous format...
@stragu also stop making sunday the first day of the week in your app, please
@Sapphaos OMG yes what on earth
@stragu And please use international time codes too! At last no AM/PM 🤪
@stragu Interesting.
But what incentive do U.S.Americans have to switch? Applications shouldn't be storing dates in any format that can't be translated without loss off information.
Based on how people around me react to non-American date formats, if applications for Americans were to start using international date formats, they'd get a dreadful number of downvotes and complaints.
Wouldn't a better choice be to make the date's display abide by the operating system's setting?
@stragu Use ISO 8601 format instead.
I signed a contract this year and filled in the date in yyyy-mm-dd format. Everyone involved gave me a hard time about it and a few were concerned writing a date this way would make legal problems later.
America is a weird place, even if you're from here.
@stragu I came across some monster who was using YYYY-DD-MM. 
@kurtm oh god what no.
Although it’s guaranteed someone has managed to do even worse with YY-DD-MM, why the hell not. People have no heart.
@stragu Speaking as a person in/from the US: Yes please! Let's move MDY dates and non-metric measures to historical curiosities like Roman numerals.
@stragu ISO8601 ALL THE THINGS
Just do what I do any use a nonsensical mix of Farenheit, M/D/Y, LB, KG, KM, CM, IN, and FT
@stragu YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.NNNZ is the way to go!
@Kurt good blurb on SI units, but the motorbike pic is truly magnificent.
@stragu I mean, it seems like the correct thing to do is to respect the user's regional settings. That's what they're there for.
What hurts me is the fractionary lengths: 41/64" is longer or shorter than 5/8"?
In 1857 Joseph WhitWorth wrote: «...instead of our engineers and machinists thinking in eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds of an inch, it is desirable that they should think and speak in tenths, hundredths, and thousandths...»
@stragu ISO-8601 or death