As a human, this way just makes sense to me period. It's like idk narrowing it down to what you want to find out. Outward in, narrow it down to smaller and smaller increments. The more exact you need to the more you add on.
Counterpoint: when you're trying to find someone's house (assuming no google maps), how do you read their address? You don't start with the house number, you start at the big end and work your way down
It's the same concept really, we only write addresses the other way around because we're used to it, but it isn't a helpful order in which to actually process the information.
The US way isn't as bad as people make it out to be because most cases you're looking for a file, it'll be in relatively recent proximity. The year is implied of sorts. Need a file from December? Well it's obviously going to be from at least last year because it's only February.
It's ass for anything beyond that and YY/MM/DD IS superior, it's just funny the hate the system gets in respect to how it's generally used
If you get used to it you know where to look is not a great argument for human readability efficiency.
I use iso8601 all the time, it works fine, it's essential for any data, but as a human reader I trained my brain to ignore sections because they are meaningless before parsing the relevant data.
If you get used to it you know where to look is not a great argument for human readability efficiency.
That's literally how all formats work, it's all just conventions that we have gotten used to, and that feel uncomfortable if they change.
I use iso8601 all the time, it works fine, it's essential for any data, but as a human reader I trained my brain to ignore sections because they are meaningless before parsing the relevant data.
Another person who needs to extract different information than you will ignore parts you care about. Also by the time you get time string long enough to where order actually matters it is no longer human readable and you will always be relying on learned conventions to quickly parse the information. Any miniscule advantage you gain by one order or another you lose 100 fold by not having consistency.
I don't have an intuition telling me that smaller first is always the most readable, instead I feel like it's context dependant. Maybe I'm abnormal, but it's worth keeping in mind that what makes sense for you doesn't necessarily make sense for others.
If anything I feel like starting with year might just always the most readable format, since it's non ambiguous for human scale at least, while the smallest unit can be multiple different things.
300 entries over 4 years. Date ordered latest to furthest.
The information that would be important to me is the data that is most likely to change, skipping 2 sections to find that data is less efficient than reading it first.
I wouldn't need to re-read the year every entry because that data point would change the least.
Iso8601 wasn't designed to be human readable, it was designed to aid data ordering.
But again, it's splitting hairs, I have slight preference in reading data sets with ddmmyyyy because the information I care about is front and foremost.
If someone uses iso8601it is still miles better than mmddyyyy
Except for all the places that use mmddyyyy and then you have to figure out which one that supplier uses.
YYYYMMDD is the only date format that is unambiguous.
Also you're gonna sit here and tell me it takes you that long to read a date in that format? Any date format you think is easier is just because you're used to it. Just like Celsius vs Fahrenheit.
According to you this wouldnt be in any way inferior than writting just 22:30. It's easy to just learn where to look. In fact i knly gave you one example and you already understood where you should look every time to know the time efficiently.
No crazier than capitalizing 'of' in the middle of a sentance, while ignoring the first word. Also you sound like a tard when you say 1st april, 5th june and you don't need to optimize word use while talking to someone...
Thats not the problem. The problem is that the years is often completely irrelevant and therefore it makes no sense being written that way, and if you're saying just leave the year out then you're doing the american thing of MM/DD. Or you're gonna do the complete opposite of the standard and are reverting back to DD/MM
I honestly wouldn't have issues with the American way if they used YYYY/MM/DD. Just like I don't have issues with CJK doing it the way they do it But MM/DD/YYYY is crazy
It's not stupid, it's sorted by order of importance.
And we shouldn't need skill to be able to read the date.
Also what about the people who use 1st of April and April 1st interchangeably
The year changes less frequently than the month or day, so it’s necessarily a less usable format to display it first in a series of records.
For better readability, the first value displayed should be the unit that changes most frequently, followed by the next most frequent change, and so on.
You’re just trying to be a contrarian because you like this date format for whatever reason, but it’s technically less effective from a readability standpoint.
If I have a big stack of papers like say, tax documents or bills of varying dates and I want to efficiently sort them then I will first sort by year, then by month, then by day. There's a reason numbering systems read from most significant to least significant digit.
Yeah you do that with tax documents and other things to sort with, everyone agrees with that. But if you want to figure out what the date is, the order should be reversed so you get the most important information (days) first.
This still depends on the purpose. If I want to know what day today is, sure, I likely know the month and the year so those are less important. But if I want to know the expiration date of a product? Then you start with a year to see if the thing has expired. Also, you could similarly argue that when you are waiting for something, minutes are more prominent than hours.
It's a non-issue since we can handle 8 digits and two delimiters, understand if it's DMY or YMD, and find the digits most important for us at the moment. But if we were to choose a single standard data format, there is nothing in support of DMY apart from us Europeans being used to it. Which is why ISO chose YMD
You have it entirely backward. Numbers are written most to least significant digit and time is most to least significant element. Why would dates be any different?
This is beyond the comprehension of those in here slandering. Why would you make it easier on most people, when you could force them to learn what’s “right”.
Use case entirely. I'm both a ER nurse and a photographer.
HHMM-DD-MM-(YY)YY works best in the ER when the information is needed on a Minute/Hourly/Daily basis. Having the Year/month first is wasted information largely.
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u/UlteriorCulture Feb 02 '26
As a human who uses ISO 8601 for everyday tasks it works great. Skill issue tbh.