It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
ISO is better for archiving and sorting, inarguably so. But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage, where the day and month are much more important than the year.
Both have their uses, but for different situations. mm-dd-yyyy is just batshit though.
Yes, ISO-8601 is objectively better than YYYY/DD/MM or MM/DD/YYYY or other strange formats. But, because it isn’t the most widely used format, it can be less efficient when there’s no danger of MM/DD vs DD/MM confusion.
If person A is talking to person B and they’re from the same culture, some culture-specific version like DD/MM/YY might be easier for them because it’s what they’re both used to, even if it is objectively inferior. But, if person A is talking to person C who is from a different place/culture things get more challenging because if the day of the month is 12 or under, it’s hard to distinguish between DD/MM or MM/DD. Even if person C knows that person A comes from a place that does DD/MM, they don’t know if person C used the native DD/MM format they’re used to, or translated it to them to MM/DD because person A was trying to make things easy for person C.
One of the advantages of the hyphens in ISO-8601, aside from them working with files, is that hyphens in dates are less common than slashes, so if someone sees 1212-11-12 they’re more likely to understand that it’s an ISO-formatted date. If they see 1212/11/12 it might be a MM/DD date or a DD/MM date.
To be fair, the time separators don’t behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.
And unlike most „forbidden characters“ for file names, the colon is actually used in NTFS: to separate the file path from the name of a named fork Alternate Data Stream.
As for why it’s better:
ISO is better for archiving and sorting, inarguably so. But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage, where the day and month are much more important than the year.
Both have their uses, but for different situations. mm-dd-yyyy is just batshit though.
Uh, no.
It literally just depends to what you are used to.
Yes, ISO-8601 is objectively better than YYYY/DD/MM or MM/DD/YYYY or other strange formats. But, because it isn’t the most widely used format, it can be less efficient when there’s no danger of MM/DD vs DD/MM confusion.
If person A is talking to person B and they’re from the same culture, some culture-specific version like DD/MM/YY might be easier for them because it’s what they’re both used to, even if it is objectively inferior. But, if person A is talking to person C who is from a different place/culture things get more challenging because if the day of the month is 12 or under, it’s hard to distinguish between DD/MM or MM/DD. Even if person C knows that person A comes from a place that does DD/MM, they don’t know if person C used the native DD/MM format they’re used to, or translated it to them to MM/DD because person A was trying to make things easy for person C.
One of the advantages of the hyphens in ISO-8601, aside from them working with files, is that hyphens in dates are less common than slashes, so if someone sees 1212-11-12 they’re more likely to understand that it’s an ISO-formatted date. If they see 1212/11/12 it might be a MM/DD date or a DD/MM date.
Start using it and suddenly it becomes most used. It is the little acts that make a difference.
mm-dd-yyyy is sorted by size of number sets. It is no more or less arbitrary than sorting it by size of timespan.
ISO 8601 is the only measurably better format. Otherwise just use whatever you have in your area and don’t be a snob about it.
To be fair, the time separators don’t behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.
And unlike most „forbidden characters“ for file names, the colon is actually used in NTFS: to separate the file path from the name of a
named forkAlternate Data Stream.See, I hadn’t even read about this. TIL :)
Still, I use ISO8601 all the time when it comes to written dates :)