The sane ordering outside iso8601 revolves around the most significant bit. When you ask for the time, 34 minutes is usually not significant in any matter in written contexts since you could be reading it more than an hour later. Hence hours are more significant than minutes (verbal can often be an exception, “20 minutes past” can be enough context if someone asks for the time). But the “time” part of datetime is always more significant than the “date” part. The year is least significant since that one changes the least, then comes month, and lastly year. In many contexts knowing it is 14th of September is enough. In chats it might even be enough to say “14th” if you’re talking about a date in this very month. But due to the timespan between writing and reading, minutes more often than not is meaningless without hours, hence hours become more significant.
Of course HH:mm dd/mm/yyyy is inferior when it comes to computer parsing due to iso8601 being the easiest to sort. (And because of Americans it is the only format to cause no confusion). But it is going least significant first in the sense that you are presented with year first, something that is often redundant in human-to-human interaction (depending on context you might say year is more significant than time in the case of wanting to know when an article was released, but you know, there’s always more exceptions than rules).
So to sum it up: Use whatever date time format you want as long as you use a format fit for the context it is used in. Unless you’re saving it to a database/directory/etc. Then use iso8601 so I can easily sort it.
p_consti@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Is this supposed to be a joke? Because this is the standard datetime format in large parts of the world
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Yeah… People are weird in this comment section. One person said the only natural way to read numbers was biggest first, as if it were a universal truth. And while there are variations in date format, to my knowledge most people don’t write the date with the year first? Like, it’s the least useful number to put first. I have rarely asked for the date and been actually inquiring what year it is. The day is the number I want to know most of the time. Day, month, year, in order of which number you most likely need to know first.
Month, day, year on government forms for some reason, though :/
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 5 days ago
No, getting the year wrong by 1 is much more significant than getting the day wrong by 1. If you’re arguing that it won’t happen because people will infer from context the correct year, then you’re actually assuming that the person already does know the year first. The only reason why people don’t state the year is because it is already known by the listener. But just because it’s unstated doesn’t mean that it isn’t critically important.
If you’re measuring duration, for example, you will put the largest unit first. The longest serving prime minister of the UK served for 20 years and 315 days. Magellan’s expedition around the lasted 2 years, 11 months, and 16 days, if you count from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The course record for the Iditarod race is 7 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, and 57 seconds.
And some languages are more irregular than others about numbers. In English, we say “sixteen” where the ones digit is said before the tens digit. French has some base 20 naming conventions that screw up the order, too.
But when we write numbers, we go left to right, largest to smallest. That’s why describing time should follow the same convention, and why ISO 8601 exists.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Sure