I’m a bit lost here. Should I use british conventions? US conventions? Is there indian conventions? Or maybe cultural points I should be aware of?
Google is confusing me more than it is helping me?
Thanks.
Avoid confusion in dates by saying May 6, 2024. This is the Canadian way because we had dd/mm/yy, but American influence of mm/dd/yy led to mass confusion. Everyone switched to May 6 to avoid it all.
There’s also ISO 8601, which does YYYY-MM-DD, though that doesn’t permit for writing out the date as a name or not specifying the year (the latter of which…might be a plus, I suppose). That’s internationally unambiguous. Anything of the format NNNN-NN-NN is YYYY-MM-DD everywhere.
I also like it because unlike either DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, the numeric and lexicographic sort order is the same.
EDIT: Well, okay. I guess that that’s not true for years prior to “0001” or years after “9999”. In the former case, though, we rarely know precise dates enough to be using dates anyway, and in the latter case…well, eight millennia down the road, if we’re still around and using Arabic numerals and dating things off the approximate birth of Christ, I imagine that we’ll just upgrade to YYYYY-MM-DD.
Oh we’ve canadianized this too. We have yy-mm-dd. The two digit year makes it really fun. Pretty sure I’ve seen yy/mm/dd too. And we have yy-mm-dd where the mm is a two letter abbreviation with MA and I have to look it up each time if it’s March or May. We also have yy-mmm-dd with the more common letter abbreviations. Those are all government abominations of ISO.
But then there’s also the European standard of “6 May 2024”. ;)
Are you serious? It’s spelt out. The other one you can confuse day and month.
