• PR3CiSiON@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Largest to smallest? So should I write December 02, 2024 as 2024/12/02? And then February 12, 2024 as 2024/12/02?

      /s

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Unironically yes, because it makes it easy to sort by date.

        When you sort by name, the year will get sorted first, then the month, then the day. So it’ll sort like this:

        2021-05-19
        2021-07-23
        2023–06-20

        Notice that everything is sorted chronologically. But if you do MM-DD-YYYY then you get this instead:

        05-19-2021
        06-20-2023
        07-23-2021

        Notice that the 2023 date is between the two 2021 dates. This is even worse if you do DD-MM-YYYY, because now the first number is changing constantly. It may not be a problem with only three dates, but imagine a spreadsheet with 2000+ entries, or a folder with dozens of files archived by date, to allow for potential rollbacks, versioning, etc…

        There’s a reason ISO standards for timestamps list things big to small: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in that specific order every time.