Editing 1179: ISO 8601

When abbreviating the date into numerical form, {{w|Date format by country|various areas of the world}} tend to list the year, month, and day in different orders (as well as with different delimiting symbols), which can cause confusion particularly when the day value is 12 or lower allowing it to be easily interpreted as the month and vice versa. As a {{w|public service announcement}}, this comic states that there is in fact one international standard for writing numeric dates, set by the {{w|International Organization for Standardization}} in its {{w|ISO 8601}} standard: YYYY-MM-DD.

The comic then proceeds to list several discouraged ways of writing out the date of the comic's publication, as they do not match the standard. It begins with several commonly used ones in countries around the world but then begins to list increasingly uncommon ways, ranging from strange (Roman numerals) to quirky (binary, Unix time) to essentially impossible (painting the numbers onto a black cat).

The title text provides a perfect example of the kind of ambiguity that can arise when non-standard formats are used. The ISO standard was in fact published on 1988-06-05 and amended on 2004-12-01. This is mentioned in the title text in MM/DD/YY format; however, there is no way to naturally figure this out, particularly with the second date.

 

Date formats were again the subject in [[1340: Unique Date]] and [[2562: Formatting Meeting]].

| MM/DD/YYYY, used mostly in the [https://www.trustedtranslations.com/blog/how-are-dates-written-in-different-countries United States, Belize and Micronesia].

| DD/MM/YYYY, used variously in South America, Canada ({{w|Date_and_time_notation_in_Canada|officially uses ISO 8601}}), Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe.

| YYYY.MM.DD, used in Japan, South Korea and Hungary. Same as ISO 8601 except with different punctuation.

| YYYY. MM. DD., with month as {{w|Roman numerals}}, used in Hungary. In this format, February and November are prone to be confused with each other: "II" vs. "11".<br/>Similar formats with the opposite ordering (27. II. 2013) existed historically in various European countries like France, Germany and Italy.  

| ^D⁄_M-YY, traditional format in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

| Year and decimal fraction of year. 0.158904109 is a decimal approximation of 58/365, with February 27 being the 58th day of the year. This format may be easier to read for computers/programs in some contexts, but is difficult for humans to interpret.

| {{w|Unix time|UNIX Timestamp}}, a standard method of storing absolute time in many computer systems and defined as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 on 1970-01-01 (UTC). The Unix time listed here appears to mistakenly be for '''2012'''-02-27, which is also mentioned by [[Randall]] in the original transcript. The Unix Timestamp for 2013-02-27 would be 1361923200.

| A useless format where the numbers 2013, 2, and 27 written as needlessly long arithmetic expressions using just the digits 1 and 3. For additional confusion, the values are delimited by slashes, enabling confusion with the fraction bar.  (If evaluated literally, the entire expression evaluates to 670.963, or 671 minus one twenty-seventh.)

| MM/DD/CC/YY, where CC stands for century. This format is never used.{{Citation needed}} Note that while months and days count starting from 1, centuries and years in this format count from 0 for extra confusion. But the CC value is widely used on many operating systems to distinguish between the 20th and 21st century, represented by the values "19" and "20" because 1950 belongs to the 20th century.

| <table style="display: inline-table; line-height: 0.6em; align: middle; text-size-adjust: none;"><tr style="font-size:7pt; text-align: center"><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>4</td><td></td></tr><tr style="text-align: center"><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>7</td></tr><tr style="font-size:7pt; text-align: center"><td>5</td><td></td><td>67</td><td></td><td>8</td></tr></table>

| An obfuscated format where the small numbers indicate the positions where the respective large digits should be placed. In this reading, 0 is used at positions 2 and 5, 1 is used on position 3, etc. Coincidentally or not, positions 1 to 4 (the year) being all placed above their digits and 5 to 8 (month and day) below; the result being 20130227

:*1330300800