Jesper Nørgaard wrote:
I even disagree about the assumption that yyyy-mm-dd is unambigous [...]
I have always liked another standard, the yyyy-mmm-dd standard, [...]
In French, June 6th in year 1944 was 1944-JUI-06, and July 6th was 1944-JUI-06... See the problem? (I even remember of a past version of a well-known spreadsheet program that stumbles on this one). Of course, these are in real use, so we have some systems to disambiguate: using four letters (but then May "mai" is a problem), or using "JUN" for "juin" and "JUL" for "juillet"), but this is a problem anyway. If you think on agreeing upon English is a solution, what about: - Russians (and a lot of other people) that needs to change the keyboard encoding to type a date in the middle of a run of Cyrillic text... - the non-English natives where the name of the months are *really* different ; - the non-English people that are *not* English enable.
That humanity has still not come up with a completely unambigous date format which is generally accepted, really shows how much IT is still in it's infancy.
Have a look toward the discussions of the next format for time expression (the one that will survive to 2038): it will show you that, indeed, things are still to evolve. Antoine