Re “ Regional date formats vary throughout the world and it's often difficult to find a human-friendly date format that feels intuitive to everyone. The advantage of dates formatted like 2017-07-17 is that they follow the order of largest to smallest units: year, month, and day.”
I disagree. ISO 8601 is great for machine readable dates. For human readable dates I prefer to spell the month out.
17 July 2017 is more readable than 2020-07-17. Yes it is in English but if your audience is in English and the rest of your content is in English then it’s fine.
That is a UI issue though. Internally keep dates and times as proper date/time typed, when you have to use strings use ISO 8601 as it is unambiguous (aside from an ancient bug in MS SQL Server if you happen to have your user locale set to British), only bother converting to some other format for display purposes.
For a changelog in text format I think it is safe to assume the reader will understand yyyy-mm-dd, and it is safer than dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy due to the lack of ambiguity. Also if they don't understand they'll know and hopefully learn the standard, where with other numeric formats they could blindly assume they have understood.
> 17 July 2017 is more readable than 2020-07-17
I don't agree there, but that could be what I'm used to. The textual month at least removes the ambiguity so is significantly preferable to the same order in a numeric-only form.
> Yes it is in English but if your audience is in English…
But if a chunk of your audience is American? IIRC they generally verbalise dates in mdy order which is why they ended up using that order in numeric forms, so they may find it as jarring, or more so, as ymd. Not that I alter my spelling for American comfort, but as clarity-to-the-audience is the arguement here…
If course if the text you are working on is mainly for your benefit, forget everyone else and do what works best for your style/comprehension/preference.
I disagree, I can hardly remember the ordering of months in my native language, never mind in english. (I can never remember which comes first, June or July).
I disagree. ISO 8601 is great for machine readable dates. For human readable dates I prefer to spell the month out.
17 July 2017 is more readable than 2020-07-17. Yes it is in English but if your audience is in English and the rest of your content is in English then it’s fine.