International date format

The International date format as defined in ISO 8601 attempts to standardize the numeric representation of dates. Different people through out the world are inclined to write the date in different forms. The standard proposed by ISO 8601 is to represent the date by the year first, followed by the month, and then the day (YYYY-MM-DD). This helps to avoid confusing the month for the day. For example, if someone wrote the date as 02/04/2004 you might take it as the fourth of February or as the second of April. This problem does not arise with a standardized date format. Furthermore, in the International date format the date can be sorted by a computer from greatest to least which is a simple matter to list dates in form of earliest to latest or vice versa in that they are sequential. This standard also denotes time order as hours, minutes, then seconds (HH:MM:SS) which is how most people already write the time, and if the time is to be included with the date it simply follows immediately after. As a final example I have written this article on the third of January, 2005 at 13:38 which is represented in this format as 2005-01-03 13:38. This standard should be used and promoted by all people to avoid date confusion in the future.

For more information please visit: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html