Although, curiously enough, my local paper (Watford, Herts, England) always uses the format: Friday, June 4, 1999 so maybe we are moving to the US system Best wishes Alan Pritchard The GLOBAL GAZETTEER: the world on file http://www.allm-geodata.com
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Scott Harrington wrote on 1999-06-02 20:55 UTC:
The feature on date notations appeared in the 01/06/99 edition of the Wall Street Journal, including a quote from our illustrious Mr. Kuhn.
Oh dear,
That strange quote from the illustrious Mr. Kuhn was all that survived from a detailed >30 min phone interview that took place over a month ago. It seems enough Y2K craze web pages point to my ISO 8601 summary that even journalists now stumble across it. I didn't like the resulting article much. Mr. Auerbach presented dd.mm.yy as THE international standard format and yyyy-mm-dd as something only pushed by "a small but influential band of global order-makers" (that must probably be us then :-), ignoring the Japanese/ Chinese traditional Bigendianism completely. He also ignored all the evidence that I listed on ISO 8601 quickly gaining momentum in Europe. In general, the article has a clear tendency to make fun of international standardization and it desperately tries to mix in good old-fashined All-American [TM] patriotism to generate the warm fuzzy national-anthem-singing feeling that Auerbach probably thinks the reader seems to hunger for. The information on ISO 8601 served only as a cheap background contrast in this image ...
Well, it wasn't the first disappointment I had with journalists who probably know already what they want to write before they interview you.
In case you want to comment about the article to the author, his email is
Jon Auerbach <Jon.Auerbach@news.wsj.com>
I'll attach a copy of the article below.
About the Bud label: Does 02Jan03 now mean 2003-01-02 or 2002-01-03? Who cares, I am looking forward to collect Y2K bottles saying 02Jan100 anyway ... :-)
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>