Confusion
Often, I will see a date somewhere and have to figure out what the date actually means even though it's right there in front of me. This is because most people use either the MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY date format when using solely numbers to tell the date. The problem with this is that two different dates could be referenced here. For example, if I typed 'Published 1-8-21', one could interpret it as 8th day of January 2021 or 1st day of August 2021. In fact, typing this now, it's confusing me. When I see number only dates where the day or month is written first, I must process through my mind the possible day/month combinations and think about the context in which the date is being given. For example, "Is this originating in the US or somewhere else?" is the most common question I ask myself when figuring this out. A two digit year makes it especially confusing. People will even argue over the 'correct' between these two formats (Let's even assume the whole year is written) and their rationale is just dependent on whether their country primarily uses one or the other with people arguing for the DD-MM-YYYY format to at least claim its ascending pattern is more logical. However, I believe that both of these formats are to not be used and believe YYYY-MM-DD is superior.
YYYY-MM-DD Superiority
Sometime in 2018, I thought about the day-first vs. month-first formats and decided to use DD-MM-YYYY; however, it just didn't feel right. Although it was the more logical format, I didn't like it. I then thought, instead of ascending, what about a descending format so the year would be first. I then started to use the YYYY-MM-DD format and found that this format was what I liked, and then thought about its logic more. When we analyze something with a date, what is usually the most important part of the date? It is the year as things are almost always associated with their years and not months or days as without the year, months and days would mean nothing. So, the most logical date format is YYYY-MM-DD, placing the most important part of the date first. And with this format, the entire 4 digit year is always written out and since a YYYY-DD-MM (Day after year) format has almost no usage anywhere to my knowledge, putting the full year first only has one format that is possible and therefore requires much less thinking than a format where the year is last, especially if the year is represented with only two digits.
Separation symbols do not matter, I just much prefer using '-'; however, I have discovered that using '-' as the separation symbol allows you to also use '/' to put multiple days or other parts of a date into a single date. Time should also be 24-hour.
Written 2022-1-11 Published 2022-2-1