SaraMGY'all, America desperately needs to embrace the metric system.
Fer reals.
ADHDel-DRAFT-v10-final (2).doc@saramg @lmgenealogy …and start writing your dates the same way as every other country.
Lynn McAlister UE 
@lmgenealogy @saramg Much like lots of our language we likely moved to distance ourselves from the US when they went their own way.
I like that our date is more human-relevant yet we use Celsius for temperature. The US use human-relevant Fahrenheit but then mess up their dates!
@del @lmgenealogy Negative. ISO-8601 or GTFO.
@saramg @lmgenealogy I’m a UXer so the answer is it depends. Let me attempt to soften your GTFO 😂
1.
Friday, 5th May 2023 for humans (and readability). Shortened as appropriate:
- Friday, 5th May 2023
Useful for dates way in the future.
- Friday, 5th May
Most times we can presume the year and drop it.
- Friday, 5th
Drop the month if we’re referring to this month (or next if the numerical value is lower than today).
- Friday
If the date is within seven or so days of today we can even rely on the day of the week and don’t even need the numerical date.
Including the actual day of the week at every stage makes it useful, #accessible and #inclusive, particularly for the #neurodivergent community; as much as 20% of the population.
2.
Obviously all the above is little help when working with data. That’s when 2023-05-03 is the only way.
@del @lmgenealogy I was ready to agree right up until "Friday" by itself. I have had WAY too many arguments with people using that variant incorrectly. e.g. "No, not tomorrow-friday, the next friday, if I meant tomorrow-friday I'dda said tomorrow!"
Which just makes my engineer brain scream.
@del @lmgenealogy
Obviously yes, spoken dates are a very different animal and I never say "See ya on 2023-05-05!"
Written dates though.... I'm less inclined to exclude year and will pretty much only do "5th May, 2023" or "2023-05-05" as the only unambiguous options.
@lmgenealogy @del Right. That's what I mean. X/Y/Z is meaningless unless we're lucky to be talking about a date after the 12th of the month.
ShadSterling@saramg @lmgenealogy @del I just never write the month as a number, or the year as only 2 digits, so it’s never ambiguous. Some might pause for a moment to translate the ordering, but they’ll never misread it as a different date
@ShadSterling @saramg @del I never write the month as a number either, since I live in the US but don't use US dates - writing out the name of the month just prevents confusion.
@saramg @lmgenealogy Can I be so bold as to ask you to try and include days of the week too? People typically know their own daily or even weekly routine reasonably well but may not immediately know what day of the week an arbitrary numerical date in the future falls on.
By including day of the week you provide context around the date that helps people orientate themselves and understand how the event might fit in with their life, routine and availability. 😌
Reay JespersenProblem there being, we sure as hell don't have a standard for that in Canada.
In one shopping trip and for Canadian products, I'll see best before dates ranging from 06MR2023 to MAR 06 23 to 2023MR06, along with the ever-loathed 06-03-2023 (with no indicator of what's what, so wait, is that March 6th, or June 3rd?)
More than caring what the format is, I just want us to agree on one and have everyone fucking do it that way.
@reay @saramg @lmgenealogy This. I was thinking of your loathed version. Everyone but the US goes day-month-year. I work for a US-based multinational US and though most of their staff are in other countries they constantly try and push the US format on us —but without any heads up that it’s not making use of our local regional settings.
Aarrrrrhhhhh!!
Aarrrrrhhhhh!!
lp0 on fire 
@reay, do they use JN? I'd be left wondering if that's January or June…
@lp0_on_fire I think that’s a thing, too, yes. And I mean, some stuff you can just figure it out. Dairy isn’t lasting months, so it’s the closer of the two possible interpretations. But, like, peanut butter? No clue.
And all of that would be remedied by just having some (ANY) standard format.