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Dates on the web

D. Keith Robinson writes about Using Dates For Featured Web Content. Keith’s right, including a date with your content really is a no-brainer. I’ll add an anecdote of my own. Several years ago I ran a popular news site for Team Fortress Classic, a team based online first person shooter game with a thriving clan scene. I was careful to include dates on every piece of content, but in my youthful naivety I neglected to include the year. The years rolled by and the content built up until I suddenly realised that I was no longer sure what year some of it was written in! The site has sadly now passed in to history but the lesson remains: the web moves faster than you might think, so omitting the year in your dates is a pretty dumb thing to do.

It’s pretty obvious but I’ll point out anyway that using dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy for dates on sites is a bad idea as well. Us crazy brits use the former, them crazy yanks use the latter and everyone ends up thoroughly confused about any written date before the 13th of the month. I personally like to use the full “4th December 2003” format, but when space is limited the least ambiguous format is ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD.

Posted 4th December 2003 at 2:31 am

This is Dates on the web by Simon Willison, posted on 4th December 2003.

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8 comments

  1. I agree that the dates can get confusing, especially since the web is more international than it was in the past. Your solution definitely kills any confusion that might arrive. As for Team Fortress, it seems the sequel has been lost in the bellies of Valve headquarters...shame.

    The Scholar - 4th December 2003 02:49 - #

  2. I completely agree that the best way to present a date is in the full format such as '4th December, 2003', 'December 4th, 2003' or whatever.

    I'm not too sure that the ISO Standard solves any problems though. It makes sense logically, but as we are generally used to dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy, the likelihood of misunderstanding yyyy-mm-dd is still high - it can make just as much sense to interpret such a date as yyyy-dd-mm. Because it isn't commonplace in every-day layman usage, it isn't very usable.

    Patrick Griffiths - 4th December 2003 09:59 - #

  3. You mean people won't understand when I write 2003-12-04T10:10:15Z? Shocking! ;)

    Phil Wilson - 4th December 2003 10:12 - #

  4. btw, it's interesting to note that old articles on Slashdot (e.g. http://slashdot.org/articles/01/08/24/1253228.shtm l) don't have the year in the date, but newer ones do.

    Phil Wilson - 4th December 2003 10:24 - #

  5. This got me thinking - what about the best way to display time?

    Patrick Griffiths - 4th December 2003 15:08 - #

  6. ...and here was me thinging you'd lost track of the focus of your blog and moved into internet dating!

    TAXI!!!

    Matt. :-)

    Matt - 4th December 2003 16:43 - #

  7. Haha Matt, I thought the same thing at first :)

    Anyway, I agree that this is important, but I don't include dates in my blog, only "Posted X hours|days|etc ago". I've long thought about adding dates, but it's easier to think about it than do it..

    Eivind Lie Nitter - 5th December 2003 10:07 - #

  8. I'd have to agree with Partrick. ISO Standard may be perfectly clear to us "geeks" but I have doubts as to the clarity for non-technical readers.

    The US military uses a format of ddmmmyyyy - i.e. 08DEC2003, if I remember correctly (it has been nearly ten years since I was in). This clarifies the British-US month issue, but it is not necessarily any easier for a computer or a person of a different language to read.

    Oh, and Phil, Slashdot used the year, it just wasn't Y2K compliant ;)

    David Engel - 8th December 2003 16:02 - #

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