<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: mutt/1296: iso date/time format by default



On 2005-09-29 13:58:41 +0200, Rado S wrote:
> [=- Thomas Zehetbauer wrote on Wed 28.Sep'05 at 22:30:18 +0200 -=]
> 
> > > {...}: it's hard to tell which part the month
> > >is, it's still too often used ambiguously.
> > 
> > After y2k there remain only two date formats that may be
> > confused: DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY. This is why ISO-8601 places
> > the year first and makes the format unambigous.
> 
> If all adhered to it, then it would be fine. But since in the wild
> it's not yet widely adopted, people still do nasty things.
> Ambiguity doesn't arise from different formats used only with
> mutt, but what is used everywhere else, too. With y2k not
> everything got better, some still use only 2 digits for year,
> making confusion even worse. ;)

Even if some people still use 2-digit years and other old formats
(DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY), the ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) is
really unambiguous, in particular because one knows where is the
year (since it is always on 4 digits in this format) and because
no-one uses a YYYY-DD-MM format (so that one knows which is the
date and which is the month).

Note: in ISO 8601, one *may* write YYYYMMDD, but for humans, it
is better to use the recommended "-" separator: YYYY-MM-DD.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA