You’re thinking to hard. The best way to write a date is Julian. Today is 26216.
So… this Julian… is he a friend of yours?
Ew.
yyyymmdd
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!
AKA typically the single most relevant reason to record one at all. But yes. Most people prefer to begin by thinking about the least significant piece of information, and then go from there.
Date format has nothing to do with sorting by date.
Y-DDD-MM
It is currently 6-004-08
This is art.
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
Same but with dots instead of slashes. Otherwise I can’t be sure it’s the right one.
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.
MM/DD/YY
It’s an industry standard because it’s everywhere. America, fuck yeah!!!
YYYYMMDD is the ISO standard.
That’s a red flag… He has obviously not received the xkcd PSA.
There is for everything a
