Something you quickly run into if you correspond with people in both the U.S. and Europe, which I have done over my career as well as in my personal life, is that we don’t write dates the same way. If you think March 14th is Pi day because in the U.S. it is written as 3/14, people in most of Europe will wonder why you think there is a 14th month to the year. And if you want to make a joke about May 4th, as in “May the fourth be with you”, it is 5/4 in the U.S., and 4/5 in most of Europe. And it can be even more complicated once you drag in the rest of the world. There is simply no uniformity. You can see this with this page at Wikipedia. And we are not even consistent in how we talk about dates. In the U.S. we might well say “May 4th”, and that does indeed match how we write dates. But then we will insist that our independence day is the “Fourth of July”, almost like we are not a British colony any longer, but let’s use their date format for one of our most important dates.
In my experience, each side thinks the other is a bit odd, but regards it as a harmless eccentricity. But which side is correct in this? The answer, of course, is neither. The one absolutely correct date format has been defined, and you can find it in the ISO 8601 standard. The correct date format is YYYY/MM/DD, because that puts the elements of the date in a logical order. Why is this the logical order? Well, suppose you were filing documents by date. Would you start by putting all of the documents from the 4th day (without regard to month or year) into a group? Or would you first collect all documents for a given year? Now, you might argue that filing documents is something people don’t do as much of these days. We have computers and digital documents, we don’t need any filing cabinets. But that only strengthens my argument, as you can easily verify. For example I am writing this on February 13, 2025. If I use a date code for my digital file, and I make it 02132025, what happens if I later on create file on January 6, 2026? That would then be 01062026. Try this, and you will see that in your file manager 01062026 will appear before 02132025, because all computers treat the significance of digits from left to right.
But if you follow the ISO 8601 standard, the most significant part of the date is on the left, and all of your files will be in order. And once you get used to it, your life is easier. An example of this is photos. My wife and I like to travel, and we take a lot of photos using our smart phones. And every photo we take uses date/time stamp as part of the file name, and the dates all follow the ISO 8601 standard. So I can easily sort my photos in the order in which they were taken. And since I have over 13,000 photos in my Flickr Pro account, a little help with sorting them is really nice. I now use this format not just for digital file names, but for most of my dating purposes. It just makes sense.
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