You’re thinking to hard. The best way to write a date is Julian. Today is 26216.
Ew.
yyyymmdd
Y-DDD-MM
It is currently 6-004-08
This is art.
Same but with dots instead of slashes. Otherwise I can’t be sure it’s the right one.
YYYY-MM-DDYep and it needs to use hyphens and not slashes. It helps avoid missed typos or mis-reads in some situations, especially if hand-written.
There are also variants with single dots too. I sometimes do timestamps without any separator too, depending on the context (such as file backups):
YYYYMMDDin example 20260805.and it’s perfectly sortable
oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.
I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it’s unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don’t even use a year.
other formats are confusing
Good luck sorting anything by date!
MM/DD/YY
It’s an industry standard because it’s everywhere. America, fuck yeah!!!
YYYYMMDD is the ISO standard.
ISO 8601 or gtfo
The one that ends us with f… I mean ISO 8601 of course
I proper shit post would have suggested “mm/dd/yyyy”.
The problem is not the format itself, its just sometimes we don’t know which format is used: 07/07/26
Edit: This was probably a bad example, because it does not matter which format, as it is clear it is 7th of July 2026 in both possible formats. A better example: 01/02/26
Obviously that’s February 26th 2001
You are so evil! :D
For organizing my stuff I use
yyyy/mm/ddbecause in my opinion it’s much better for that. Otherwisedd/mm/yyyy.it’s either DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD.
4/Aug/2026
Already saw 1 person write 4/7/26. Writing that 3-4 letters for the month both solves the day/month vs month/day issue, and the off chance someone makes mistake of the month number
Yeah, this is how I do it. Computers are more than capable of handling the three-letter abbreviation for months nowadays, versus some bygone era where perhaps we needed just numbers. This is how I date anything that I need to out a date on.
That’s a red flag… He has obviously not received the xkcd PSA.
There is for everything a
