The date 06/07/08 could mean any of the following:
Each country has its own traditional method of writing dates. That was fine when it could be assumed that the author and his/her audience were all in, and from, the same country. That situation is less and less common, particularly for information placed on the Internet.
In particular, confusion between the "European" DD/MM/YY and "American" MM/DD/YY dates arises for 144 days each year, on the first to the twelfth of the month - almost two days out of every five in any year. This is especially true in Canada, where both representations can be seen!
Furthermore there is some potential for offence, if a web page is aimed at an international audience but shows dates in what is clearly a "national" format.
International Standard ISO-8601 specifies that dates are written in the format YYYY-MM-DD, separated by hyphens. For example the date 2006-07-08 is, unambiguously, the eighth of July 2006.
This standard has been adopted into many national standards including those of the United States and most European Union countries.
By publishing dates in ISO-8601 format, you are demonstrating that you're aware of the above problems and that you understand the diversity of your audience.
If you are interested in helping to draw attention to the issue, please feel free to add one of the following buttons onto your website.
| Size | Button | HTML markup |
|---|---|---|
| 88x31 | |
<a href="http://www.esperanto.uklinux.net/iso8601/iso8601.php"><img src="http://yourserver/iso8601-ok.png" style="width:88px;height:31px;border:0" alt="This website uses ISO-8601 dates"></a> |
| 80x15 | |
<a href="http://www.esperanto.uklinux.net/iso8601/iso8601.php"><img src="http://yourserver/iso8601-ok-80x15.png" style="width:80px;height:15px;border:0" alt="This website uses ISO-8601 dates"></a> |
You are requested to save a copy of the image to your own webspace. Please do not hotlink to the ones on this site.
Once you have added the button, email the webmaster (email address below) and we will put a link to your site from this page, free of charge.
To have your site added to the list, contact the webmaster at: iso8601@dprk.abelgratis.co.uk
Date of last modification:
2007-01-06