Just Spell the Month

parkscomputing.com

4 points·paulmooreparks··3 comments

Nothing stops one from using ISO 8601 dates today - I highly recommend this to everyone.

If I have to put a date in the document, it's always in the 20xx-05-10 format. No one has been complaining that they could not understand it yet

(and I've just checked in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr... - only one region used yyyy-d-mm format, but even then it is not used "causally". Which means that format as close to unambiguous as one can get.)

I'm in the US, and this is what I do, mostly because if I have to include a date in a filename, this is the best format to use. I think it's a good idea to use the same date format consistently, so it's also the one I use in other contexts.

It has never caused any real confusion. Even people who've never seen this format before seem to intuit that when they see the year first, the next number will be the month.

That said, there are some places where the longhand form (e.g. January 1, 2025) is culturally expected and in those situation, I follow the expectation.

Just use NATO Standardization Agreement 1059. The date in question is written as 10MAY25 using this NATO standard. This of course is assuming human-to-human communication. For machine-to-machine communication then you would use RFC 3339 which is a profile of ISO 8601.

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