[thelist] Date and Time issue Worldwide

[Simon Willison]

Chris Johnston wrote:

>I always thought that here in North America the standard was
>
>month/day/year
>
>whereas in Europe it was
>
>day/month/year
>
Yeah I never understood why Americans do it that way round. A day is
shorter than a month which is shorter than a year, hence DD/MM/YYYY.
whatever the reason, personally I always make it obvious which number is
the day and which is the month (preferable by displaying a date as 13th
April 2002 and keeping any date selection mechanisms to holding the
names of all 12 months in a select box). As for internal storage you
can't go wrong with a unix timestamp - unless of course you need to
record dates earlier than 1970 ;)