alt Hacker News8601, when used fully according to spec sucks. It makes today 20250902. It doesn't have seperators. And for adding a time it gets even less readable.
Its a serialization and machine communication format. And that makes me sad. Because YYYY-MM-DD is a great format, without a good name.
Replies
account42 • yesterday at 8:08 AM
It does have a good name: RFC 3339. Unlike the ISO standard, that one mandates the "-" separators. Meanwhile it lets you substitute a space for the ugly "T" separator between date and time:
> NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T". Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.
YYYY-MM-DD is ISO8601 extended format, YYYYMMDD is ISO8601 basic format (section 5.2.1.1 of ISO8601:2000(E)[1]). Both are fully according to spec, and neither format takes precedence over the other.
[1] https://www.pvv.org/~nsaa/8601v2000.pdf