And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?

For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.

And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right?

Because it's the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It's first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.

ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that

Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Arent there uses other than ordering files?

The ISO standard is best for ordering files, but that doesnt mean its good for other things

Its impossible to confuse it with the other 2 presented in this post so you could use it for files and use another one for other things

Edit: i may have been misunderstanding the context in which the ISO standard is claimed to be superior

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Europe: 10/12/2025 USA: 12/10/2025 If you don’t have context as to which system this is, would 2025/12/10 make things less ambiguous?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don't think I've ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that's not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.

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