Now, if we can just come up with a standard date
format ...
That's already been done; the ISO came up with that long ago.
yyyy-mm-dd.
It's too bad they didn't pick YYYY-MON-DD.
Strictly from an information-ambiguity perspective, I agree. (While
*nobody* uses yyyy-dd-mm, there is, absent that context, an ambiguity
for the first 12 days of each month.) But I can see why they didn't;
it raises the politically touchy question of whose language gets to be
the one whose MON abbreviations get used.
ISO date format has the advantage that chronological sort order equals
lexicographic sort order (assuming your digits are in order); if you
strip out the delimiters (dashes, above; I've seen slashes used too),
it also equals numeric sort order.
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
