OpenFest 2006 - Share the Freedom

March 27, 2004

Disambiguation

Noticed the expiration date on a milk carton today - 04.04.04. Nice :)

Which kinda leads me to a question I've wondered about for some time: just how did people ever come up with the mm/dd/yy date format?! IMHO, it is the most illogical one in use - unless, of course, its logic is deeply entwined with some hysterical raisins, like people writing mm/dd for easier sorting and then thoughtlessly adding the year at the end. Okay, so mm/dd does sort better than dd/mm, but why not then make the next logical step and put the year in front, like the International Date Format (somewhat belatedly) did?

The year-in-two-digits rant is left as an exercise for the reader - and yes, there still are people who use mm/dd/yy (two digits for the year) to represent dates in official documents. The mind boggles.

Posted by roam at March 27, 2004 02:14 PM

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