Allan Clark wrote:

> I would suggest one format used as consistently as possible -- one we
> can read, and that the machine can parse, and then situations that are
> read by both machine and human don't require choosing-rules.

No debate on that.

> Other countries (I assume you're American) are able to figure out that

Yep, I'm American.

> the 07 is the month, just as they can figure out that in a number,
> thousands are followed by hundreds, then by tens, then by ones.
> Americans tend to want to reverse it from the archaic accounting
> practices.

Well, I don't want to get into some international fight about who does what 
for what reason.  It's enough to say that there are many different formats 
used by different cultures for their own set of reasons.  The 'goodness' or 
'badness' of these various date orderings and formats really don't matter. 
The point is that people from various places can't really be sure if the 07 is 
a month or a day.  Yeah, if they see enough of them so that the '01' goes 
above '12' then they can reverse engineer it, but in isolation and without 
training 2007-07-01 has the potential to be mis-understood by anyone that 
doesn't happen to live in a country that uses iso ordering by default -- and 
that's plenty.  So...my whole point is that if you're primary objective is 
instant readability by the most humans then I personally don't think iso is 
it.  I'm perfectly fine with 2007-07-01 since in this context it's probably 
not that critical to know if 07 is a day or month.

Jeff

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