[dspillett]

> yyyy-mm-dd

> whereas the Europeans would prefer it not exist.

I (a UKian) use YMD ordered formats everywhere possible and have done for many years, a few decades in fact, perhaps even before I know of ISO8601. I've seen more pushback about it from USians than us EUians, for no reason other than it isn't mm/dd/yyyy. In my experience most people outside technical circles on both sides of the big wet are unaware and just use their local legacy format, when EUians see yyyy-mm-dd (or the undecorated yyyymmdd) they tend to get it and accept it (though often keep using what they have always used), where some very vocal USians take a different format existing as a direct comment that their usual format is wrong and feel that as a personal slight rather than technical matter.