Using the Wrong Date Formatting and the Global Problem — ISO8601
November 10, 2008 by Greg Ferro · 3 Comments
When working in a global company, a major problem is the way that some countries use the wrong date formatting. Say hello to ISO8601, standard for date formats.
You have to think global these days. — etherealmind
Most countries use the day / month / year, but a few countries use month / day / year. This causes major problems in documentation (at least) when one group is referring to 1⁄2 (1st February) and the other group 2⁄1 (2nd January).
My personal fix for this has been to use year / month / day. But my main reason has been to organise files in date order and get useful directory listing. 
ISO Standard
I recently discovered that there is an ISO standard for laying out dates in exactly this manner. ISO8601 was published in 1988, and updated in 2004 and is available ISO8601 at Wikipedia.
Calendar Date
Calendar date is the most common date representation. It is:
YYYY-MM-DD
where YYYY is the year in the Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.
Example: 2003-04-01 represents the first day of April in 2003.
Time of Day
Time of the day is the time representation, using the 24-hour timekeeping system. It is:
hh:mm:ss
where hh is the number of complete hours that have passed since midnight, mm is the number of complete minutes since the start of the hour, and ss is the number of complete seconds since the start of the minute.
Example: 23:59:59 represents the time one second before midnight.
Date and Time
Date and time represents a specified time of a specified day. When use is made of the calendar date the representation is:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
where the capital letter T is used to separate the date and time components. Thus, for a very precise date and time, look at this:
Example: 2003 – 04-01T13:01:02 represents one minute and two seconds after one o’clock in the afternoon of 2003-04-01.
Conclusion
If you are writing documents that you are going to send to a Global Audience, this is a good standard to use. Because the YEAR is the first number, it is immediately obvious that the date format is different to what you were taught at school, and it is obvious what the format means.
I would like to see everyone adopt this standard, and make my life simpler. It seems every other week I have a fellow worker in the USA who gets the date mixed up because they use different format by default. ISO 8601 means that both parties have to change and this works well in terms of gaining acceptance.
I hope you think so too.
Footnote
Note that you should only use the format YYYY / MM / DD to ensure Y3K or turn of the century problems.
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Nice to know, thanks Greg
Hi;
Thanks for this info. One of the things that amused me when I first moved to Sweden was that their date format is YYYY-MM-DD. I guess they were just following standards.
I love this entry, man, it reminds me of so much about what human might mean some day! To elaborate on this grand notion…I was recently in the US and whenever I have visited I get the imppression that some folks over the pond may “forget” that their lives are actually connected to the lives of others. I reckon this happens to people over this side of the pond sometimes, and maybe elsewhere…I don’t know. Your article about the time and date is suggesting (it seems to me) that we all need to make an effort to change in order to meet in the middle…hmmm YEAH…Go for it!
I need to add here, that there are loads of neat things about the US too, in fact I am a fan of a lot of things, I have some way cool family and friends; it’s a really go get it place, and probably a lot of folk in the US will welcome your suggestion…any responses?