[deitcher]

I love it. When I first started in IT (1994, don't ask...) working with London and Tokyo and San Fran and Singapore and everyone wrote dates differently. I just started writing YYYY-MM-DD everywhere, and all of the questions went away.

[smoyer]

Looks like ISO-8601 to me! We've standardized on using this format (extended to include time where necessary) whenever our JSON objects include a date or date/time. We've also standardized on UTC. Since our system clocks are already synchronized that way, it's easy for us and we simply i18n/l12n them on entry and/or display.

[deitcher]

It was, I just didn't know it at the time! I was simply looking for some way to write emails and spec docs in a way that everyone would have a common frame of reference with zero extra work.

Yeah, in storage (as above), I use epoch all the way through and convert as needed. But as the thread above shows, not everyone likes this path...