Chris 🌱 
Dates should always be represented with as much context as possible in transit & storage. Don't give me a date like "Mar 16" please
Christian Hergert@brainblasted what would you want them stored as?
@chergert Rather, if they're strings they should be strings with as much context as possible, e.g. 2026-03-16 vs. "Mar 16"
@brainblasted Certainly storing them as anything but ISO 8601 is a Bad Idea™.
The only numeric cases I can think of are databases where you might want numeric indexing (but still keeping various parts separate). Governments have a nasty habit of retroactively changing time and it makes things quite difficult.
nai 🖤@brainblasted do you prefer unix epoch?
Torb@brainblasted I'm in the middle of re-writing my site in a (bespoke) static site generator in Swift and my storage of publication time is human readable string ala ”13. September 2025”, and I just had to implement a custom date type to parse it within Swift's decodable framework.
That said, I wouldn't do this in like production code (and I wouldn't really use Swift of all things for this purpose anyway). 😅