2008-12-08

Let's Use YYYY-MM-DD Format

Let's use international standard numeric representation of Dates

How do you usually express date?
For example, what dose the date 08-12-07 mean?

08-12-07;
For American, it means the 12th day of August in 2007.
For European, it means the 8th day of December in 2007.
For Japanese, it means the 7th day of December in 2008.
(I'm not sure but, some other asian people recognize
as same as Japanese dose.)

The ISO (International Standard Organization) specifies
the numeric representation of Dates in ISO-8601.

===QUOTE===
ISO 8601 advises numeric representation of dates and
times on an internationally agreed basis.
It represents elements from the largest to the smallest element: year-month-day:

Calendar date is the most common date representation. It is:
YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.

Example: 2003-04-01 represents the first day of April in 2003.
===UNQUOTE===

I'd like to recommend that we as an internationally recognized licensed amateur radio operator, must use the expression recommended in ISO.
That is, 2008-12-07 for the 7th date of December in 2008.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you. I also become confused espesically when I come across to the imperial era names in Japan.

"Showa","Heisei" make me puzzled.

But recently, I came to realize that we have to be a little more careful when we create standards on those things such as on cultures or manners.

It goes without saying that it will be really convenient and understandable to use YYYY-MM-DD.

But I think "diversity" of this world should be highly esteemed.

Can we say how many people actually have got annoyed with this all over the world? :-)

It's a little complicated and that's all. Getting accustomed to MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY is a kind of bothering for us as you say.

But when you consider the alternative, it seems to be an enjoyable process to figure it out!

Atsu JE1TRV said...

Hi Leo,
Of course, I respect customs and cultures of each country.
"Diversity" is normal thing.

I don't ask everyone to use the international standard format.
I want ask amateur radio operator to use the standard format in order to avoid misunderstanding.

73, Atsu JE1TRV

Anonymous said...

I agree to use yyyy-mm-dd.
I just knew ISO specifies how to write date.
It good.

How showing my qsl card?
Then checked my card...
My qsl card format is yyyy-mm-dd.
My qsl is printed by hamlog(software),
and it standard format, it's reason why.

I'd like to know how many ham using
yyyy-mm-dd,dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy.

Atsu JE1TRV said...

Hi Leo in Kashiwa city!
Thank you for your comment.

Recently I found Elecraft K3 internal calender dose not have YYYY-MM-DD format. But It has MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY format. Hi

CU ON AIR!
Atsu

Atsu JE1TRV said...

Date on QSL must be YYYY-MM-DD.
And time shall be in UTC not local time such as JST Hi
So, my QSL is always YYYY-MM-DD and time in UTC even for JA QSL.

This is recommended for international radio amateure operator.

Kenji Rikitake said...

YYYY-MM-DD has been the standard for quite a long time in MySQL. My computer logging system is based on this.

On the other hand, I use 30-DEC-2008 format for handwriting the date, to prevent misunderstanding with my wife Kyoko, who rather use European (German) date locale (of DD/MM/YYYY). In this DD-MON-YEAR format, MON is alphabetic (abbreviation in English) and easy to distinguish from the DD field.

I personally use MM/DD/YYYY format on my memorandum; I'm rather American.

So I can only say you should explicitly note the format you are using if you don't want to get people confused.