[simonw]

It's a decision from 2003 I think. It's mainly because I'm from the UK, so I'm extremely sensitive to the risk of people confusing DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY - the least ambiguous format is to use DD-Mon-YYYY, so I picked that for my URLs.

If I was designing my blog today I'd probably drop the day and month entirely, and go with /yyyy/unique-text-slug for the URLs.

[Terretta]

ISO 8601 is least ambiguous, as there's no question of "endian-ness".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

YYYY-MM-DD

Yes, with year last, most of the world does it one way, but most of the audience are often from a part of the world that (a) thinks it's most of the world, and (b) does it the wrong way by shuffling endian-ness.

[marginalia_nu]

The killer feature of ISO-8601 style dates is that you don't need to parse the dates to sort them. Lexicographical order is chronological order. That's a pretty huge deal.

[contingencies]

This. Two additional benefits of this approach are it sorts correctly and it's already standard in China, which is effectively a whole heap of the world's internet population.

[brianzelip]

> the least ambiguous format is to use DD-Mon-YYYY

I consider YYYY-MM-DD to be the least ambiguous. But now that I look at the above, I guess the author is saying that since MM-DD could possibly be considered as DD-MM? Yuck.

[randomcarbloke]

least ambiguous is ISO 86 since it is standardised, but I agree that alpha month is unambiguous.

[latchkey]

Thanks simon! Makes perfect sense.