xkcd: ISO 8601
XKCD has hit the nail on the head with this one. Listen people: if you use a numeric date notation, it can be ambiguous because different countries use different order of information: eg day/month/year or month/day/year. The only non-ambiguous numeric notation of date is YYYY-MM-DD. I find it stupefying that in this modern age, this age of a global Web, people are still using these ambiguous date formats on their Web sites. Maybe as an American living in the UK, and having launched a UK version of a US dot-com, I'm especially sensitized to this issue? The most recent example I've come across is the TechCrunch events listings side bar – and TechCrunch is (supposed to be) a global brand? Anyway – great to see someone else is as irked by this as I am. #petpeeve #blogthis #iso8601
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Markus Kuhn has had the most to the point page on ISO 8601 for donkey years at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
His page on ISO 216 is also very good: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
Another ignorance of standards that also irks me and is more up your sleeve is that of E.123 (http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-E.123-200102-I/e) I fought for it in all the companies I worked for, especially the telecoms ones.
-d