There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
ISO 8601 date format. Not because it’s from a standards body, but because it’s simple, sensible, clearly defined, easy to recognize, and very effective.
Date field placement in any order other than most-significant-digits-first is not only counterintuitive, but needlessly complicated to work with. Omitting critical information like the century is ambiguous and confusing.
We don’t live in isolated villages any more. Mixing and matching those problems by accepting all the world’s various regional and personal date styles, especially with no reliable indication of which ones apply in any given case, leads to the hodgepodge of error-prone date madness that we have today.
The 2024-09-02 format should be taught in schools and required in official documents. Let the antiquated date styles fall into disuse outside of art and personal correspondence, like cursive writing.
And it can be sorted alphabetically in all software. That’s a pretty big advantage when handling files on a computer
I had the fortune of being hired to build up from zero my department, and one of the first “rules” I made was all dates are ISO-8601 and now every process runs with 8601, if you use anything different your code is going to fail eventually when it finds another column date in 8601.
I love this standard. If you dig deeper into it, the standard also covers a way to express intervals and periods. E.g. “P1Y2M10DT2H30M” represents one year, 2 months, 10 days, 2 hours and 30 mins.
I recall once using the standard when writing a cron-style scheduler.
I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.
Also: Does Excel recognise a full ISO8601 timestamp yet?
I’ve seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like “pay date” would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.
If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don’t think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.
Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!
Thats an issue with the time library, not with timestamps. Actually timestamps are always in UTC, you need to do the conversion to your local time when displaying the value. There should be no possible off-by-one errors, unless you are doing something really wrong.
RFC 3339 is a simplified profile of 8601 that only covers YYYY-MM-DD style formatting, if you only ever use that format and avoid the things like “2024-W36” they’re mostly interchangeable.
The week-of-year is far more relevant in Western Europe, and is used quite a bit in business. I have a Junghans watch that has a week complication.
It’s an important format outside of the US, and gives ISO-8601 an edge as a standard of conformance.
For the newbies: RFC 3339 vs ISO 8601. Bookmark this site.
That looks like an interesting diagram, but the text in it renders too small to read easily on the screen I’m using, and trying to open it leads to a javascript complaint and a redirect that activates before I can click to allow javascript. If it’s yours, you might want to look in to that.
The table below works, though. Thanks for the link.
Alas it’s not my site (and I think it’s meant to be read on a desktop screen), so I can’t fix it.
7 digit years feels way to optimistic, but I’ll be rooting for us.
Some countries already use it officially too :)
I arrived to manage releases in a company, the previous manager named releases as “release04092016”, as USA standard. My first recommendation was to name releases as “releaseyyyymmdd” so “release20160409”. I was asked by another manager why to change that, so I showed her a sorted list of releases “git branches” and asked her, can you tell me there when was the last release? (a very common question) Of course, to find the last release you need to check the whole list because the mmddyyyy order is useless. The answer with yyyymmdd was immediate, just look at the last row.
Also, you can sort by ascending file names