The Peoples Date Format

[Insight]

George, take note

Decided to avoid European & American styles (dd-mm / mm-dd) as we'd get a load of Brits, Aussies and Kiwis voting for them just to piss the Yanks of and vice-versa.

[Jai Dee]

I voted for the second format in the context of displaying/reading posts on the TV forum.

Having said that, my own preferences for filing reports, MOM's, etc on my computer are always in the first format as it is more easily sorted chronologically.

[Kerryd]

I voted for the second format in the context of displaying/reading posts on the TV forum.

Having said that, my own preferences for filing reports, MOM's, etc on my computer are always in the first format as it is more easily sorted chronologically.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Proper format should be: DD-MM-YYYY (i.e 15-06-2005)

Going from the smallest unit (Day) to the next largest (Month) to the largest (Year)

If everybody did that, there would be no confusion over something like: 05-06-05

Everyone would know it's the 5th day of the 6th month of the 5th year (and not the 6th of May).

Of course there will be a slew of detractors waiting to flame anyone who doesn't agree 100% with their way of thinking, so bring it ON !

[TizMe]

It depends...

My photo album folders are named using yyyy-mm-dd format

[Thomas_Merton]

I voted for the second format in the context of displaying/reading posts on the TV forum.

Having said that, my own preferences for filing reports, MOM's, etc on my computer are always in the first format as it is more easily sorted chronologically.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I agree 100% with Jai Dee.

It is important to distinguish between, on the one hand - display- and on the other - the need of the OS to sort files chronologically.

[george]

A summary of the international standard date and time notation

by Markus Kuhn

International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces.

In addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer usage compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.

Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who design user interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols should be familiar with ISO 8601.

Contents: Date, time of day, time zone, software hints.

Date

The international standard date notation is

YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the usual Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.

For example, the fourth day of February in the year 1995 is written in the standard notation as

1995-02-04

Other commonly used notations are e.g. 2/4/95, 4/2/95, 95/2/4, 4.2.1995, 04-FEB-1995, 4-February-1995, and many more. Especially the first two examples are dangerous, because as both are used quite often in the U.S. and in Great Britain and both can not be distinguished, it is unclear whether 2/4/95 means 1995-04-02 or 1995-02-04. The date notation 2/4/5 has at least six reasonable interpretations (assuming that only the twentieth and twenty-first century are reasonable candidates in our life time).

Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants:

easily readable and writeable by software (no ‘JAN’, ‘FEB’, ... table necessary)

easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison

language independent

can not be confused with other popular date notations

consistency with the common 24h time notation system, where the larger units (hours) are also written in front of the smaller ones (minutes and seconds)

strings containing a date followed by a time are also easily comparable and sortable (e.g. write “1995-02-04 22:45:00”)

the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both keyboard data entry and table layout easier

identical to the Chinese date notation, so the largest cultural group (>25%) on this planet is already familiar with it :-)

date notations with the order “year, month, day” are in addition already widely used e.g. in Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and a few other countries and people in the U.S. are already used to at least the “month, day” order

a 4-digit year representation avoids overflow problems after 2099-12-31

As dates will look a little bit strange anyway starting with 2000-01-01 (e.g. like 1/1/0), it has been suggested that the year 2000 is an excellent opportunity to change to the standard date notation.

ISO 8601 is only specifying numeric notations and does not cover dates and times where words are used in the representation. It is not intended as a replacement for language-dependent worded date notations such as “24. Dezember 2001” (German) or “February 4, 1995” (US English). ISO 8601 should however be used to replace notations such as “2/4/95” and “9.30 p.m.”.

Apart from the recommended primary standard notation YYYY-MM-DD, ISO 8601 also specifies a number of alternative formats for use in applications with special requirements. All of these alternatives can easily and automatically be distinguished from each other:

The hyphens can be omitted if compactness of the representation is more important than human readability, for example as in

19950204

If only the month or even only the year is of interest:

1995-02 or 1995

In commercial and industrial applications (delivery times, production plans, etc.), especially in Europe, it is often required to refer to a week of a year. Week 01 of a year is per definition the first week that has the Thursday in this year, which is equivalent to the week that contains the fourth day of January. In other words, the first week of a new year is the week that has the majority of its days in the new year. Week 01 might also contain days from the previous year and the week before week 01 of a year is the last week (52 or 53) of the previous year even if it contains days from the new year. A week starts with Monday (day 1) and ends with Sunday (day 7). For example, the first week of the year 1997 lasts from 1996-12-30 to 1997-01-05 and can be written in standard notation as

1997-W01 or 1997W01

The week notation can also be extended by a number indicating the day of the week. For example, the day 1996-12-31, which is the Tuesday (day 2) of the first week of 1997, can also be written as

1997-W01-2 or 1997W012

for applications like industrial planning where many things like shift rotations are organized per week and knowing the week number and the day of the week is more handy than knowing the day of the month.

An abbreviated version of the year and week number like

1995W05

is sometimes useful as a compact code printed on a product that indicates when it has been manufactured.

Note: The ISO standard avoids explicitly stating the possible range of week numbers, but this can easily be deduced from the definition. Possible ISO week numbers are in the range 01 to 53. A year always has a week 52. (There is one historic exception: the year in which the Gregorian calendar was introduced had less than 365 days and less than 52 weeks.)

Proof: Per definition, the first week of a year is W01 and consequently days before week W01 belong to the previous year and so there is no week with lower numbers. Considering the highest possible week number, the worst case is a leap year like 1976 that starts with a Thursday, because this keeps the highest possible number of days of W01 in the previous year, i.e. 3 days. In this case, the Sunday of W52 of the worst case year is day number 4+51*7=361 and 361-366=5 days of W53 belong still to this year, which guarantees that in the worst case year day 4 (Thursday) of W53 is not yet in the next year, so a week number 53 is possible. For example, the 53 weeks of the worst case year 1976 started with 1975-12-29 = 1976-W01-1 and ended with 1977-01-02 = 1976-W53-7. On the other hand, considering the lowest number of the last week of a year, the worst case is a non-leap year like 1999 that starts with a Friday, which ensures that the first three days of the year belong to the last week of the previous year. In this case, the Sunday of week 52 would be day number 3+52*7=367, i.e. only the last 367-365=2 days of the W52 reach into the next year and consequently, even a worst case year like 1999 has a week W52 including the days 1999-12-27 to 2000-01-02. q.e.d.

Both day and year are useful units of structuring time, because the position of the sun on the sky, which influences our lives, is described by them. However the 12 months of a year are of some obscure mystic origin and have no real purpose today except that people are used to having them (they do not even describe the current position of the moon). In some applications, a date notation is preferred that uses only the year and the day of the year between 001 and 365 (366 in leap years). The standard notation for this variant representing the day 1995-02-04 (that is day 035 of the year 1995) is

1995-035 or 1995035

Leap years are years with an additional day YYYY-02-29, where the year number is a multiple of four with the following exception: If a year is a multiple of 100, then it is only a leap year if it is also a multiple of 400. For example, 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 is one.

Time of day

The international standard notation for the time of day is

hh:mm:ss

where hh is the number of complete hours that have passed since midnight (00-24), mm is the number of complete minutes that have passed since the start of the hour (00-59), and ss is the number of complete seconds since the start of the minute (00-60). If the hour value is 24, then the minute and second values must be zero.

Note: The value 60 for ss might sometimes be needed during an inserted leap second in an atomic time scale like Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). A single leap second 23:59:60 is inserted into the UTC time scale every few years as announced by the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris, to keep UTC from wandering away more than 0.9 s from the less constant astronomical time scale UT1, which is defined by the actual rotation of the earth. In practice you are not very likely to see a clock showing 23:59:60. Most synchronized clocks resynchronize again to UTC some time after a leap second has happened, or they temporarily slow down near the time of a leap seconds, to avoid any disruption that an out-of-range timestamp might otherwise cause.

An example time is

23:59:59

which represents the time one second before midnight.

As with the date notation, the separating colons can also be omitted as in

235959

and the precision can be reduced by omitting the seconds or both the seconds and minutes as in

23:59, 2359, or 23

It is also possible to add fractions of a second after a decimal dot or comma, for instance the time 5.8 ms before midnight can be written as

23:59:59.9942 or 235959.9942

As every day both starts and ends with midnight, the two notations 00:00 and 24:00 are available to distinguish the two midnights that can be associated with one date. This means that the following two notations refer to exactly the same point in time:

1995-02-04 24:00 = 1995-02-05 00:00

In case an unambiguous representation of time is required, 00:00 is usually the preferred notation for midnight and not 24:00. Digital clocks display 00:00 and not 24:00.

ISO 8601 does not specify, whether its notations specify a point in time or a time period. This means for example that ISO 8601 does not define whether 09:00 refers to the exact end of the ninth hour of the day or the period from 09:00 to 09:01 or anything else. The users of the standard must somehow agree on the exact interpretation of the time notation if this should be of any concern.

If a date and a time are displayed on the same line, then always write the date in front of the time. If a date and a time value are stored together in a single data field, then ISO 8601 suggests that they should be separated by a latin capital letter T, as in 19951231T235959.

A remark for readers from the U.S.:

The 24h time notation specified here has already been the de-facto standard all over the world in written language for decades. The only exception are a few English speaking countries, where still notations with hours between 1 and 12 and additions like “a.m.” and “p.m.” are in wide use. The common 24h international standard notation is widely used now even in England (e.g. at airports, cinemas, bus/train timetables, etc.). Most other languages do not even have abbreviations like “a.m.” and “p.m.” and the 12h notation is certainly hardly ever used on Continental Europe to write or display a time. Even in the U.S., the military and computer programmers have been using the 24h notation for a long time.

The old English 12h notation has many disadvantages like:

It is longer than the normal 24h notation.

It takes somewhat more time for humans to compare two times in 12h notation.

It is not clear, how 00:00, 12:00 and 24:00 are represented. Even encyclopedias and style manuals contain contradicting descriptions and a common quick fix seems to be to avoid “12:00 a.m./p.m.” altogether and write “noon”, “midnight”, or “12:01 a.m./p.m.” instead, although the word “midnight” still does not distinguish between 00:00 and 24:00 (midnight at the start or end of a given day).

It makes people often believe that the next day starts at the overflow from “12:59 a.m.” to “1:00 a.m.”, which is a common problem not only when people try to program the timer of VCRs shortly after midnight.

It is not easily comparable with a string compare operation.

It is not immediately clear for the unaware, whether the time between “12:00 a.m./p.m.” and “1:00 a.m./p.m.” starts at 00:00 or at 12:00, i.e. the English 12h notation is more difficult to understand.

Please consider the 12h time to be a relic from the dark ages when Roman numerals were used, the number zero had not yet been invented and analog clocks were the only known form of displaying a time. Please avoid using it today, especially in technical applications! Even in the U.S., the widely respected Chicago Manual of Style now recommends using the international standard time notation in publications.

A remark for readers from German speaking countries:

The German standard DIN 5008, which specifies typographical rules for German texts written on typewriters, was updated in 1996-05. The old German numeric date notations DD.MM.YYYY and DD.MM.YY have been replaced by the ISO date notations YYYY-MM-DD and YY-MM-DD. Similarly, the old German time notations hh.mm and hh.mm.ss have been replaced by the ISO notations hh:mm and hh:mm:ss. Those new notations are now also mentioned in the latest edition of the Duden. The German alphanumeric date notation continues to be for example “3. August 1994” or “3. Aug. 1994”. The corresponding Austrian standard has already used the ISO 8601 date and time notations before.

ISO 8601 has been adopted as European Standard EN 28601 and is therefore now a valid standard in all EU countries and all conflicting national standards have been changed accordingly.

Source: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

[george]

Date Formats ISO 8601

Different standards may need different levels of granularity in the date and time, so this profile defines six levels. Standards that reference this profile should specify one or more of these granularities. If a given standard allows more than one granularity, it should specify the meaning of the dates and times with reduced precision, for example, the result of comparing two dates with different precisions.

The formats are as follows. Exactly the components shown here must be present, with exactly this punctuation. Note that the "T" appears literally in the string, to indicate the beginning of the time element, as specified in ISO 8601.

[/b]

Year:

YYYY (eg 1997)

Year and month:

YYYY-MM (eg 1997-07)

Complete date:

YYYY-MM-DD (eg 1997-07-16)

Complete date plus hours and minutes:

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20+01:00)

Complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds:

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00)

Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a decimal fraction of a

second

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)

where:

YYYY = four-digit year

MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)

DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)

hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)

mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)

ss = two digits of second (00 through 59)

s = one or more digits representing a decimal fraction of a second

TZD = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm)[/b]

This profile does not specify how many digits may be used to represent the decimal fraction of a second. An adopting standard that permits fractions of a second must specify both the minimum number of digits (a number greater than or equal to one) and the maximum number of digits (the maximum may be stated to be "unlimited").

This profile defines two ways of handling time zone offsets:

Times are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), with a special UTC designator ("Z").

Times are expressed in local time, together with a time zone offset in hours and minutes. A time zone offset of "+hh:mm" indicates that the date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm" minutes ahead of UTC. A time zone offset of "-hh:mm" indicates that the date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm" minutes behind UTC.

A standard referencing this profile should permit one or both of these ways of handling time zone offsets.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Examples

1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 corresponds to November 5, 1994, 8:15:30 am, US Eastern Standard Time.

1994-11-05T13:15:30Z corresponds to the same instant.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

[Thetyim]

Am I expected to read all that ?

Will there be a test later ?

[meadish_sweetball]

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

[Totster]

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The second makes more sense to me.... and most others I reckon, but what do I know eh....

totster

[meadish_sweetball]

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

The second makes more sense to me.... and most others I reckon, but what do I know eh....

totster

Not most others I think, but most other native English speakers, perhaps. It just looks more familiar.

But an all-digital standard proceeding in chronological order surely makes the most sense in a global perspective.

15-06-2005 is an equally good alternative, but that was not included in the poll.

[Totster]

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The second makes more sense to me.... and most others I reckon, but what do I know eh....

totster

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not most others I think, but most other native English speakers, perhaps. It just looks more familiar.

But an all-digital standard proceeding in chronological order surely makes the most sense in a global perspective.

15-06-2005 is an equally good alternative, but that was not included in the poll.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I thinks that's it.... more familer = easier to understand at a glance.

15-06-2005 is my preferred format, I think Insight probably meant all formats displaying in that kind of order.... or maybe he didn't.... Insight..?

totster

[jayenram]

I thought I knew what day today is ............... until I read this thread.

[Jai Dee]

15-06-2005 is an equally good alternative, but that was not included in the poll.

I suspect that Insight's reasons for the poll are to gain support to lobby George into changing the date format displayed on the forum...

Judging from the strength and content of George's posts I don't think he's got much hope though.

[thymode91]

Am I expected to read all that ?

Will there be a test later ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[mnoorsapl]

not only the dates, there are other thing the "yanks" prefer to do the opposite way.

The second makes more sense.

[Insight]

Hang on while a get a shiteload of quotes together

Where the flip do you find the TOS for the forum?

Edited June 16, 2005 by Insight

[autonomous_unit]

I guess I've been computing for too much of my life... why would someone want to reverse dates and show the numbers from least-significant to most-significant (DD-MM-YYYY) instead of the way quoted above? What is peculiar about dates? I've never seen someone report time as seconds:minutes:hours, prices as satang.baht, etc.

Wait, would today be 16-06-2005 or 61-60-5002?

[ThaiPauly]

I thought I knew what day today is ............... until I read this thread.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Same here, would prefer it to tell the DAY and DATE, as I normally have'nt got a clue what day of the week it is when I log onto Thai Visa first thing in the morning

Cheers

TP

[Insight]

A summary of the international standard date and time notation

by Markus Kuhn

International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces.

In addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer usage compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.

Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who design user interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols should be familiar with ISO 8601.

...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Blah blah blah...

Date Formats ISO 8601

Different standards may need different levels of granularity in the date and time, so this profile defines six levels. Standards that reference this profile should specify one or more of these granularities. If a given standard allows more than one granularity, it should specify the meaning of the dates and times with reduced precision, for example, the result of comparing two dates with different precisions.

...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Further blah blah blah...

The ISO standard is great if you're prepared to accept the fact that general users understand this standard by default. Die-hard IT users will use a similar standard because, as mentioned previously, it's chronological and therefore makes more sense in the IT world.

However, to general users, visually it doesn't stand out anywhere near the level a textual representation of the date time would. You have to take a moment to "interpret" the date/time in the ISO format - this wouldn't be necessary if it was in a textual format.

As a few of you have already correctly presumed, the reason I started this thread was owing to the fact that some users were replying in threads which have been dormant for months, if not years. My reasoning behind this is that the date/time format quoted above each reply doesn't make immediately it obvious to them how old that reply is.

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I was under the impressino that, according to the TOS of the forum (which I can't find), all posts had to be authored in English. Therefore is it wrong assume that an English representation of the date should be accepted by the general user?

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The second makes more sense to me.... and most others I reckon, but what do I know eh....

totster

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not most others I think, but most other native English speakers, perhaps. It just looks more familiar.

But an all-digital standard proceeding in chronological order surely makes the most sense in a global perspective.

15-06-2005 is an equally good alternative, but that was not included in the poll.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I thinks that's it.... more familer = easier to understand at a glance.

15-06-2005 is my preferred format, I think Insight probably meant all formats displaying in that kind of order.... or maybe he didn't.... Insight..?

totster

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To quote myself...

Decided to avoid European & American styles (dd-mm / mm-dd) as we'd get a load of Brits, Aussies and Kiwis voting for them just to piss the Yanks of and vice-versa.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

UK or American representations of the date are not "language neutral" (And personally I find the American format downright bloody annoying). A textual format makes sense to everyone in the English speaking world.

Nuff said. The public has spoken and I'm feeling all John Lennon'd up. Can somebody kindly inform me if they see small red lasers shining on my body?

[george]

I am still confident that YYYY-MM-DD is the future, maybe it's only a matter of habit to teach the world to use a logic date format. I'll do my best!

When the next version of our forum software is due later this year, and is ready and tested, we might implement a fix in the personal settings that allows members to choose their own time format in the forum control panel.

Something like this:

http://th.php.net/date

Working on it! Voila! D

[Totster]

I am still confident that YYYY-MM-DD is the future, maybe it's only a matter of habit to teach the world to use a logic date format. I'll do my best!

When the next version of our forum software is due later this year, and  is ready and tested, we might implement a fix in the personal settings that allows members to choose their own time format in the forum control panel.

Something like this:

http://th.php.net/date

Working on it!  Voila! D

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Now that sounds like an excellent idea/compromise...

totster

[Sophon]

why would someone want to reverse dates and show the numbers from least-significant to most-significant (DD-MM-YYYY)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What is least- or most significant kind of depends on the circumstances. If we are talking about date formats to be used on this forum, in most cases the year in the date on a post is a given (being this year), and therefore the least significant part of information in the date. In most threads (except for the long running ones), the month is more or less a given as well, making the date (and the time) the most important bit of information.

Since we read from left to right it kind of makes sense to put the most significant information first. To me that makes DD-MM-YYYY the preferred format for forums like this. Of course the date format YYYY-MM-DD have many advantages in databases, but that doesn't mean that dates have to be displayed like that as well.

I guess it's mostly comes down to, what you are used to.

Sophon

[BambinA]

Wed 15th June, 2005

i prefer this one...easy for thai people as me

[baht&sold]

maybe by the year 2549 we'll have this sorted

Edited June 16, 2005 by bahtandsold

[Crossy]

I want to vote for both

The IT sensible one (first option) for when I'm at work (so my PC sorts dates in a sensible order).

And the human friendly one (second option) for when I don't want to think.

[Gumballl]

"Does anyone really know what time it is? (Does anybody really care, about time?)"

These are the proverbial questions asked by the music group Chicago.

As for me, I prefer option 2. But if I ever have doubts as to the date and/or time, I can quickly reference it on my PC, my wrist watch, and my cell phone!

Now, what would really be cool to see on TV, is a (pop-up) page that displays in real-time, the times in various locales around the world. That way I can stop performing basic math computations in my mind to figure out the time in LOS vs. the US.

[george]

A Thaivisa World Clock! Will try to find one!

time.thaivisa.com

worldclock.thaivisa.com

or something

Huski !!!!!

[kayo]

A summary of the international standard date and time notation

by Markus Kuhn

International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces.

In addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer usage compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.

Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who design user interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols should be familiar with ISO 8601.

...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Blah blah blah...

Date Formats ISO 8601

Different standards may need different levels of granularity in the date and time, so this profile defines six levels. Standards that reference this profile should specify one or more of these granularities. If a given standard allows more than one granularity, it should specify the meaning of the dates and times with reduced precision, for example, the result of comparing two dates with different precisions.

...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Further blah blah blah...

The ISO standard is great if you're prepared to accept the fact that general users understand this standard by default. Die-hard IT users will use a similar standard because, as mentioned previously, it's chronological and therefore makes more sense in the IT world.

However, to general users, visually it doesn't stand out anywhere near the level a textual representation of the date time would. You have to take a moment to "interpret" the date/time in the ISO format - this wouldn't be necessary if it was in a textual format.

As a few of you have already correctly presumed, the reason I started this thread was owing to the fact that some users were replying in threads which have been dormant for months, if not years. My reasoning behind this is that the date/time format quoted above each reply doesn't make immediately it obvious to them how old that reply is.

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I was under the impressino that, according to the TOS of the forum (which I can't find), all posts had to be authored in English. Therefore is it wrong assume that an English representation of the date should be accepted by the general user?

The first makes a lot more sense and is language neutral = better.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The second makes more sense to me.... and most others I reckon, but what do I know eh....

totster

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not most others I think, but most other native English speakers, perhaps. It just looks more familiar.

But an all-digital standard proceeding in chronological order surely makes the most sense in a global perspective.

15-06-2005 is an equally good alternative, but that was not included in the poll.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I thinks that's it.... more familer = easier to understand at a glance.

15-06-2005 is my preferred format, I think Insight probably meant all formats displaying in that kind of order.... or maybe he didn't.... Insight..?

totster

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To quote myself...

Decided to avoid European & American styles (dd-mm / mm-dd) as we'd get a load of Brits, Aussies and Kiwis voting for them just to piss the Yanks of and vice-versa.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

UK or American representations of the date are not "language neutral" (And personally I find the American format downright bloody annoying). A textual format makes sense to everyone in the English speaking world.

Nuff said. The public has spoken and I'm feeling all John Lennon'd up. Can somebody kindly inform me if they see small red lasers shining on my body?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Blah blah blah

[daleyboy]

Who cares its Thai time and that has no meaning anyway, i always go by two rules when light sleep, when dark party!!!! :D