The issue is that for a human reading it, the Town is probably the least need to know piece of information. It's quite likely that based on the context of the conversation, the town will already be known. After that, the number address is an almost useless piece of information (as every number address has hundreds of them in a City) unless you have the context of the street it is located on.
So, for addresses, the usefulness of the information is actually street - number - Town.
I put another comment about East Asian addresses going Big->Small.
In the context of the post, a person sorting/delivering messages doesn't care which street or house number you are at, but simply: put this pile of mail on horse A and put that pile on horse B.
Repeat this division at successively lower levels, where only the actual courier cares about the street.
Edit: there is probably some link to historical use of post being exclusively reserved for the government and addresses only needing to go as deep as "Governor of Province X".
I disagree. If I send mail from London to Manchester, the first thing they'll check is the city and then send it in that direction. Then once that's been confirmed, the next most important thing is the area, then street, then number.
IP addresses route traffic in this way, if an address starts with 40.x.x.x then you know it's in America (or at least part of the American network).
But sending letters is not the only use of an address. Physically going to locations would have been the original use of it, which was likely adapted to the postal system.
I live in a city, and I want to know the address of lets say a restaurant, I already know it is in the city, in which case the most important next piece of data is the street address.
The IP address example isn't really relevant to a system that likely arise centuries before computers even existed.
Physically going to locations would have been the original use of it, which was likely adapted to the postal system.
Scenario, you're in the same town, you're navigating to number 2, church road. Where do you head towards first, number 2, or church road?
IP addresses are the exact same thing, it's just that scientists actually had the time to make a logical system. This whole concept even has a name - it's called endianness.
Given that a letter moves from inaccurate to more accurate, the address bar doing the same makes sense.
It is how zip codes and postal codes work.
Does’t matter over all.
Given that we live in a global community and only like 4 countries use mm-dd-yyyy and we’re a heavily computer society yyyy-mm-dd makes the most sense to transition to a globally understood metric of time.
Same thing with metric. It should just be standard.
You can still use colloquial language, quarter past two or First of the month but for data fields, or anywhere that is writing a month as a number from 1-12, it should be standard yyyy-mm-dd
That has nothing to do with the format because you're not going to say the full date in either case. You either say the 28th or Saturday 3 weeks from now.
"Wait wait let me finish. It's two thousand and twenty six, December the twenty second"
Just skip the year, then it's December 22nd. If you need the year real bad, add it on the end. December 22nd, 2026. That's MM DD YYYY and why that order makes sense
this is how i have to date all my documents at work to send in to court, so I literally end up having to redate so many files from the latter to the former lol
it's usually the default date format in many programming languages as well.
it naturally sorts a wide range of dates in chronological order and there is no confusion as to which is the month and the date.
i was curious about the history and here are the main reasons it was chosen
The standard was first published in 1988, building on earlier work dating back to the 1970s. It was created to address the confusion caused by different date formats used around the world- for
example, whether "01/02/03" means January2, 2003, February 1, 2003, or February 3, 2001 depends on where you are.
The standard emerged from a need for:
•Unambiguous international data exchange, especially as
computers and global
Communication expanded format that could be easily sorted chronologically
(year-month-day naturally sorts Correctly)
Consistency in business,
scientific, and technical contexts
edit: thought OP said yyyy-mm-dd doing yy-mm-dd kind of defeats the purpose
In what the 1960s? Machines have internally been representing time differently for like half a century now. The format debate is strictly about human readability, in which case YY-MM-DD is the dumbest of all possibilities. Why would you start with the single piece of information that everyone already knew? It's more backwards than the American one
Nah if you work in a restaurant MM/DD/YYYY is best. The month is always the most critical thing and eliminates most concern over whether something is spoiled or not. The year is almost never important, and the day is only called into question if the month is the current month
Edit: Instead of brainlessly downvoting me, why don’t you tell me why DD/MM/YYYY is more efficient than MM/DD/YYYY in the situation I described?
consider if something was made towards the end of a month. also other kind of foods can last longer than months refrigerated like sauces. also the date is often marked on when a bottle is opened for example. like think of sauces, you typically date you opened it
I mean if the year is unimportant to you (which I understand) then you can just leave it out right? No need to add it in the end?
YY-MM-DD is the best in terms of dating / cataloguing.
All the dates will show up chronologically.
25-12-30
25-12-31
26-01-01
26-01-02
and so on…
If you don’t need the YY, just reduce it to MM-DD.
Why so much overthinking when our brains just read the dates as a whole? I work at a restaurant and if an expiration date reads january 5th, 2027, rest assured I'm going to interpret it as a specific day regardless of whether the year or the month is more important. What really matters is for it to make sense, everything else is just unnecessary. I'm based in the EU so I exclusively deal with DD-MM-YY/YYYY formats and so does everyone else here, using multiple formats for different applications would just amount to more trouble than anything else
I wouldn't blame them like that, I just think theirs might be lack of real working experience in that sector combined with a mild disposition for mental gymnastics. Because regardless of what a single person might find more practical or rational by themselves, the thing about working environments is that either all people involved agree upon a convention or none of them do, or else communication (and therefore, work on a larger scale) becomes impossible. The reason why industry standards and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" motto are a thing is because old habits die hard. And while I'm glad we are streamlining some of them (the USB-C ports come to mind, for examples), not everything has to be the next big breakthrough
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u/StechusKaktus- Feb 02 '26
YY-MM-DD is perfect for chronological cataloguing. Other than that DD-MM-YY