Clear Date Formatting

This morning, an autoresponder sent a dozen or so of these to a mailing list I’m on:

G’dday,

I’ll be out of office starting 09-08 till 13-08 included.

As I glanced at it, I thought “September to…wait…d’oh!”

It’s a good example of why using numbers for the month just isn’t a good idea when you’re dealing with anything international or cross-cultural. Just last week I read an article on WebWord about formatting dates on the web. I’m not a fan of the particular format the author chose (6-Aug-2004), but it did prompt me to check my site for any 8/6/04-style dates that might still be floating around.

Update: These days I prefer to use a shorter form of the ISO-style format like 2024-09-24 in anything that I might want to sort (filenames, for instance, or Gemini), and just spell out the month for human readability.