Abeness wrote:

> Milleron wrote:
>
>> The Air Force made this switch only this year. It's still not used to
>> the exclusion of other formats in every setting, but many official
>> forms, especially ones that are filled in with computer software,
>> require it.
>
> Interesting. About time, I'd think.

Agreed, but it's hardly new:

International Standard ISO 8601 specifies numeric representations of
date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in
international communication caused by the many different national
notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces. In
addition, these formats have several important advantages for computer
usage compared to other traditional date and time notations. The time
notation described here is already the de-facto standard in almost all
countries and the date notation is becoming increasingly popular.

Especially authors of Web pages and software engineers who design user
interfaces, file formats, and communication protocols should be familiar
with ISO 8601.

Contents: Date, Time of Day, Time Zone.

Date

The international standard date notation is

YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the usual Gregorian calendar, MM is the month
of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of
the month between 01 and 31.

For example, the fourth day of February in the year 1995 is written in
the standard notation as

1995-02-04

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html#date