http://www.geocities.com/jusjih/measure/iso8601.html
International Standard Date and Time Notation ... ever used on Continental Europe to write or display a ... Time link collection, the US Naval Observatory Server ... about the ISO date format that is partially ... Description: International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of date and time. It helps to avoid... Category: Kids�and�Teens�>�School�Time�>�Science�>�Astronomy�and�Space�>�Time www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html - 25k - webexhibits.org/calendars/index.html ploticus.sourceforge.net/doc/dates.html serendipity.magnet.ch/hermetic/cal_stud/newman.htm www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~enag/lugm-time.html http://www.cas.suffolk.edu/english/richman/Eng393/correctness.htm March 5, 2000, Sunday MAGAZINE DESK The Way We Work Now: 3-5-00: On Language; Date War By William Safire (NYT) 1033 words Language is expressed in writing with a series of symbols. When people cannot agree what the symbols stand for, all is confusion. We find ourselves gesticulating wildly in a Tower of Babel. Ah, you say, but globalization and Internetting will fix all that. Computers inside a little translating bug in our ear will enable us all to understand one another instantly. Or English will become everybody's second language until a universal language takes over someday. Oh, yeah? (That's based on the Sanskrit for ''Izzat so?'') Then how come all the nations of the world, marching into the new millennium, can't agree on what date of the month this is? A furious tug of war is going on between Europe and America that dwarfs the banana wars in importance, threatens the Atlantic Alliance and paralyzes the U.N. But nobody is willing to face up to the Date Debate. What's today? Unless we're Chinese or Hebrew or some other civilization with its own calendar, we can all agree it's the fifth day of the month of March in the year 2000. And we also agree that it's easier to put that date in a combination of words and numerals: March 5, 2000. Unless, of course, you're in the military. Then it's 5 March 2000, saving valuable commas needed for investment in missile research and -- more to the point -- nicely separating the numbers with a word. But we're all in a hurry; who wants to take all the time to write out the whole word signifying the month? Since March is the third month, we substitute the number 3 for the word's interminable five letters. So March 5, 2000 is shown as 3/5/2000. (Unless you like hyphens -- then it's 3-5-2000. Or unless you prefer voguish periods, now called dots, as The Times Magazine finger-snappingly does; then it's 3.5.2000, which has been further shortened to 3.5.00. ) This simple act of reducing a date to its shortest elements is the cause of the semiotic War Between the Continents now threatening to end globalization as we know it. ''In the United States,'' writes Dr. Alan D. Legatt of White Plains, ''a date written as 1/2 would mean Jan. 2 , while in Europe it would mean the first of February.'' So today's date -- the fifth day of the third month in the run-up to our brand-new third millennium -- is written in America as 3/5/00. (I'm a slasher, not a hyphenator or a dotter.) But in Britain and throughout Europe, those same numerals signify an entirely different date: the third day of the fifth month, or May 3, 2000. Big difference. March goes out like a lamb; rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. Even worse, when President Bill Clinton sends a cheery note to Prime Minister Tony Blair and dates it 4/11, the Yank is thinking of April 11 but the Brit thinks it is Nov. 4. This is sure to contribute to Anglo-American misunderstanding; if it leads to one leader standing the other up at a scheduled summit meeting, it could put a strain on the special relationship. To resolve this problem before it discombobulates trans-Atlantic e-mail and drives the editors of The International Herald Tribune to distraction, a nongovernmental organization that calls itself ISO has put forward a recommendation. The name is an acronym formed by the rejiggered initials of the International Organization for Standardization, headquartered in Geneva; ISO is rooted in the Greek word for ''equal,'' and this outfit seeks to get everyone to agree on the same symbols for the same things. To avert date warfare, ISO recommends that we all start with the year, followed by the month and finally the day. Today's date, in ISO format, is 2000-3-5. As they like to mutter in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. Who are these cookie-pushing cookie cutters of an unelected international bureaucracy to tell America's native speakers that we must conform to the linguistic diktats of Continental Common Marketeers and sovereignty-grabbing European Unionists? Do the Brits think that English is a better language than Merkin? ISO may call me a lationist, but I reject this backdoor attempt to force American check writers to date our support of the I.M.F. in a way alien to our ways. If those one-worlders in Geneva are so het up about standardization, why don't they adopt the American system? A millennium and a half from now, the standardeers will be writing the second of January in the year three thousand four hundred and fifty-six as 3456/1/2, while we will write it as 1/2/3456, which will be a real kick. The Brits, on the verge of giving up their pound for the euro, are losing their regard for tradition, but when it comes to habits, Americans -- even those who prattle about the need for great change at election time -- hate change. It was hard enough for some of us to memorize the month-day-year sequence in the first place (if I have that order right); we don't need to reprogram our minds just because some professional smoother-outers want everybody in the world to march in lock step. Hawks, finding geopolitical significance in this coming symbolic dust-up, will cry: if being a sole superpower does not give us hegemony in the writing of dates, why go to the expense of being a superpower at all? Doves, taking a less bellicose line, will coo: diversity is more precious than uniformity. I say: By jingo, let's stick to our slashes and hold fast to the American Way of Dating. To the standardizers, we should refuse to give a centimeter. Write today's date as 3/5/00 and let the rest of the world complain about us being out of date, out of step, out of time and out of sorts. So what if we miss a few appointments? We will be striking a blow for dialectical uniqueness, iconoclastic individuality, national sovereignty and international confusion. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company On 2/20/02 2:07 AM, "cecil touchon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > for my computer to catalog right I need to do the dates like this > yyyy/mm/dd. It is the only way to keep records lined up right. > >>> Also, I never understood why but in the US we do mm/dd/yyyy instead of > > following the rest of the world with dd/mm/yyyy, << > > cecil > http://fluxnexus.com >
