No, not a new meeting service from me, but something which has been bothering me for many years.
How do I write a date on the Web? There are so many formats available, most of them incompatible with others, that it can be a usability nightmare to choose a date representation when writing for an international, cross-cultural audience, as is the case on the web.
Fortunately, there is one solution in the ISO-developed international
date format.
The worst potential usability problems come when the date is written only with numbers as in the following example, because the date’s interpretation will be different from one country to another.
Imagine the following date: 02/04/03 Which does it mean?
* 2nd of April 2003 (European style)
* 4th of February 2003 (USA style)
* 3rd of April 2002
Your answer will depend, mostly, on which country you live in.
In most cases, writing the date in full letters would be better than the example above. Apr. 3rd, 2002, for example will be easy to understand for any English-speaking audience.
But this system does not cross borders much better than its numerical counterparts: does the French 12 Août 2042 actually mean, in English, August or October 12th?
The ISO date format
The international format defined by ISO (ISO 8601) tries to address all these problems by defining a numerical date system as follows:
YYYY-MM-DD where
* YYYY is the year [all the digits, i.e. 2012]
* MM is the month [01 (January) to 12 (December)]
* DD is the day [01 to 31]
For example, “3rd of April 2002″, in this international format is written: 2002-04-03.
Note that this format can also be used to represent precise date and time, with timezone information
Using numerical dates does have also some pitfalls with regard to readability and usability, as explained in the Date formats FAQ from http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips
Not perfect, ISO date format is, however, the best choice for a date representation that is universally (and accurately) understandable.
So if W3 say it isthe right way to go – that is what I will try to do from now onwards
When I helped develop the ISO Standards for MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), I worked with a group of 4 people to design the letter “E” so it would be unquely read by a cheque reading machine of the time(1980 ish)
It took us a week to get agreement, but was eventually released as a full ISO Standard.
In our evenings off we discussed International Date/Time formats and were convinced the way to go was:-
YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS
Unfortunately some computer engineer convinced everybody to give up the first YY of YYYY and thus was laid the foundation for the so called year 2000 bug.
I even made money out of it when called over to the State of Florida to rectify some Pensions programs for Teachers in the State. More of that later, unless I am beseiged with cries of enough already!