Dear Michael and All, This is the text of an article that was published in the latest edition of the Australian Editor's magazine, 'Australian Style'
Is 07 04 2002 the fourth of July? For years, people have used random arrangements for saying and writing dates. Usually this hasn't mattered much, because writing dates has rarely impinged on our relationships with other nations. However, as we become more computerized (personally), more multicultural (nationally), and more multinational (globally), date formats have assumed more importance. Most Australians write the date as day, month, year (dd mm yyyy); conversely, in the USA, they tend to write month, day, year (mm dd yyyy). In dealings between Australia and the USA, this can lead to all sorts of confusions and complications; does the date 07 04 2002 refer to the seventh of April or to Independence Day in the USA. Writers and editors must take ultimate responsibility for any errors, inconvenience, and additional costs arising out of the use of old ad hoc date formats. Some people avoid all-numeric dates altogether, by using number and letter combinations: 4 July 2002 or 7 apr 2002. Dates written this way are less compact, and the technique destroys the multilingual nature of fully numerical dates. I believe that the yyyy mm dd order, going from big to small, is the natural way to write dates. My reasoning is that we almost always use a descending unit size order when we combine a number of different unit sizes of the same quantity. For example, when we write a price, we start with dollars and then go to cents i.e. from big to small, as in $12.34. And when you measure your kitchen for new floor covering you measure (say) 2345 min by 1840 mm, and then change to metres to order your material (2.345 x 1.890 = 4.432 square metres). Again, you write from big (metres) to small (millimetres). We've always done this. Consider the same kitchen floor using the (fortunately now obsolete) yards, feet, inches and fractions of an inch. In this case the floor would be 2 yds (big) 1 ft. 6 5/16 in. (small) by 2 yds 0 ft 2 13/32 in. I leave this calculation to others! Indeed, our very numbering system uses the same order of big to small. Consider the number 543; the 5 hundreds (big), come before the 4 tens, and the 3 units (small) are last. Once you adopt the numerical descending method for writing dates you make some interesting discoveries. The yyyy mm dd format: o is preferable for sorting, filing and retrieving documents in date sequence. This is especially useful with computer files. o makes calculations of elapsed time very much easier, especially for date calculations such as those used for the amount of interest on an investment. o combines rationally with hh mm sss of time when you need more precision. You will also discover that you are not the first to use the yyyy min dd format. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has a world standard (ISO 8601:2000) for writing dates using this format. Most of the world's nations also have a similar standard; for example, Australia has Australian Standard AS 3802:1997, Canada has CSA/CAN3 Z234.4 (and a Federal Identity Manual, which refers to this standard for writing the date and time in government documents) and the USA has ANSI X3.30. So why do we cling � often fiercely � to strange randomly selected date formats of the past? Perhaps the main reason is that the way we write dates is not the same as the way we say dates. People say the date in different ways; you might say the seventh of April (dd mm) and your correspondent from the USA might say April the seventh (mm dd). In future, I am confidant that dates will be written in the rational yyyy mm dd format for all purposes; especially for formal, contractual and government writing. We will continue to use a range of ways of saying the date, but we will gradually change to writing it in a rational way. There are three combining pressures that cause me to make this claim. Firstly, it is preferable for sorting, filing and retrieving documents in computer files. Secondly, our relationships, both nationally and personally, demand that we avoid language specific writing, which excludes people from our audience. And thirdly, the very existence of ISO 8601:2000 and its recognition by individual nations ensures its gradual acceptance globally. Pat Naughtin, from Geelong, is a speaker, writer, editor, and publisher who consults internationally on the International System of Units. Pat acted as an adviser for the chapter on numbers and measurement for the recently published 6th edition of the Australian Government Style Manual. Cheers, Pat Naughtin CAMS Geelong, Australia on 2002-10-11 19.19, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > check out my mail I wrote to the publisher > > Dear Mr. Sulzberger, > > I like to read your newspaper online and I appreciate the articles but there > is one thing which really hassles me. > > You are used to write date and time in the obsolete US notation. I guess you > are aware that many of your visitors are international which aren't and > shouldn't be familiar with that notation. > > I strongly encourage you and your reporters to use in your whole > publication, at least online, the ISO time and date notation. This would be a > big relief > for us reading and understanding the artcles. > > please refer to http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html to get further > information on proper notation > > yours, > > > Michael Ossipov
