[zaarn]

>Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日

I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

>You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

Or simply use the ISO standard, which I do and I will assume that people I communicate with understand ISO and parse it correctly. If they don't it's not my problem.

[coldtea]

>I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

That's not the parent's point though -- if you know the characters, the meaning is immediate. Whereas 2018/02/04 remains opaque.