If you live in an English-speaking country, or if you're using an English-based software, chances are good that you're using "English" dates, and that today's date is displayed by default as 01/30/05 or 01/30/2005. On the contrary, in most areas of the world, the so-called "French" format will lead to something like 30/01/2005. Since 2003, the International Organization of Standardization wants us to use a single format worldwide. This ISO 8601 document, "Numeric representation of dates and time," has chosen the YYYY-MM-DD representation, going from left to right from the largest element to the smallest. So today is 2005-01-30. On this very serious topic, you also can read this funny article from the Toronto Star, "We can put a man on the moon but we can't agree on what the date is." Anyway, because of this incompatibility between different date notations, today is January 30, 2005 for me.
The ISO document describes the problem.
How can one avoid confusion when a date like 08/04/02 has at least six different interpretations around the world? A notation like 01/02/03 could mean 1 February 2003 or 2 January 2003 or 2 March 2001. Usually by deduction one can sort it out. Usually -- but sometimes, huge and costly confusions can arise. The problem is that all-numeric dates are not unambiguous and depend very much on local custom. That's usually OK within a country or region even if there are local inconsistencies between firms and administrations; but outside...?
A simple nicety, you might say. Does this all matter? Well, it certainly does if you "misinterpreted" what was on that ticket. And if you multiply this type of unfortunate occurrence by millions, in business contexts as well as at the individual level, you can see that the compounded problem is something quite frightening.
Before delivering its conclusions on the formats to use in the future, the ISO describes some apocalyptic consequences of today's situation.
Think of the number of times that dates and times crop up in business dealings of all sorts, from insurance forms to travel agencies, from banks to tax forms. And there, huge stakes hang on dates, that can make the difference between winning a fortune... or losing it. Goods being traded internationally are relying on the right dates at each and every step -- and wrong dates often mean wrong deliveries or no deliveries at all!
The Toronto Star looks at the same situation, but with a touch of irony. Here are some short quotes from this article dated 2003-01-23 (or January 23, 2005 if you prefer).
In the United States and, increasingly Canada, today's date -- January 23, 2005 -- would be 01/23/2005, or 1/23/05 for short. In Europe, it would be 23/01/2005, a numerical version of 23 January 2005 or le 23 janvier 2005. Like a broken clock that shows the correct time twice a day, the two sides agree with one another 12 times a year -- January 1, February 2, March 3, and so on.
That would be fine if the Americans only talked among themselves, but the world isn't like that.
So when the American clan sends out invitations for a Feb. 12 family reunion in Florida, the European wing of the family won't bother showing up until December. They wouldn't be on speaking terms after that.
Even for newspapers in Canada, things are not that simple, according to this example.
On the masthead of its business section, the Globe and Mail uses the European format, while the Financial Post opts for the American model at the top of its stock listings. So, depending on which of those two papers you happen to glance at after reading this one, tomorrow will either be 24.01.05 or 01.24.05. (At least they agree on the dots.)
So will you switch to the YYYY-MM-DD representation or will you stick to your current date formats?
Sources: ISO 8601 document, 2003-01-30 (January 30, 2003); Kenneth Kidd, Toronto Star, January 23, 2005
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