ISO 8601 redux

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/01/26 04:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/01/26/517734.aspx

The other day, colleague Shawn Steele posted in his blog about the ISO 8601 Week of Year format in Microsoft .Net, which explains how to work around the fact that we do not exactly support the standard in our implementation. And some readers may recall when I linked to Isaac K. Kunen's post about how to work around this in SQL Server using SQLCLR integration which uses a slightly different method to get at the answer.

Now this does not mean I do not still  think that ISO 8601 is asinine  -- because I do. But I am not blind to the fact that not all of the content in the standard is (like I said!), and that if people are then it is likely not for the same reasons. :-)

If they just did not focus on human readability while being so insensitive to human preferences, I'd probably change my mind here....

 

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# Yaytay on 26 Jan 2006 10:06 AM:

Part of the reason ISO 8601 is so valuable is precisely because it is human readable and globally consistent.
I'm not going to defend having a format the supports week numbers, because I think that's stupid, but the basic ISO 8601 format can be used in many circumstances to avoid international date errors.
I'd like to see all short date formats replaced with ISO 8601, but then, I'm a brit in America (the only country that insists on using an illogical and ambiguous date format :-)

# Michael S. Kaplan on 26 Jan 2006 10:09 AM:

Hi Yaytay --

They are *all* ambiguous.... :-)

# Yaytay on 26 Jan 2006 9:03 PM:

Ah but there is only one format in any kind of usage that has a four digit year at the front.
Of course, just to ruin the benefit of this ISO make the four digits optional.

But, honestly, where's the sense in a short date format that doesn't sort properly?

# Michael S. Kaplan on 26 Jan 2006 9:08 PM:

Well, people do not always sort by date in every context, and short date format usage id nevertheless popular....
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2010/10/03 It's always back to ISO-8601 for some reason

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