US vs. European Date Notation

[Alan Pritchard]

Although, curiously enough, my local paper (Watford, Herts, England) 
always uses the format:
Friday, June 4, 1999
so maybe we are moving to the US system

Best wishes
Alan Pritchard
The GLOBAL GAZETTEER: the world on file
http://www.allm-geodata.com

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> Scott Harrington wrote on 1999-06-02 20:55 UTC:
> > The feature on date notations appeared in the 01/06/99 edition of the
> > Wall Street Journal, including a quote from our illustrious Mr. Kuhn.
> 
> Oh dear,
> 
> That strange quote from the illustrious Mr. Kuhn was all that survived
> from a detailed >30 min phone interview that took place over a month
> ago. It seems enough Y2K craze web pages point to my ISO 8601 summary
> that even journalists now stumble across it. I didn't like the resulting
> article much. Mr. Auerbach presented dd.mm.yy as THE international
> standard format and yyyy-mm-dd as something only pushed by "a small but
> influential band of global order-makers" (that must probably be us then
> :-), ignoring the Japanese/ Chinese traditional Bigendianism completely.
> He also ignored all the evidence that I listed on ISO 8601 quickly
> gaining momentum in Europe. In general, the article has a clear tendency
> to make fun of international standardization and it desperately tries to
> mix in good old-fashined All-American [TM] patriotism to generate the
> warm fuzzy national-anthem-singing feeling that Auerbach probably thinks
> the reader seems to hunger for. The information on ISO 8601 served only
> as a cheap background contrast in this image ...
> 
> Well, it wasn't the first disappointment I had with journalists who
> probably know already what they want to write before they interview you.
> 
> In case you want to comment about the article to the author, his email
> is
> 
>   Jon Auerbach <Jon.Auerbach at news.wsj.com>
> 
> I'll attach a copy of the article below.
> 
> About the Bud label: Does 02Jan03 now mean 2003-01-02 or 2002-01-03? Who
> cares, I am looking forward to collect Y2K bottles saying 02Jan100
> anyway ... :-)
> 
> Markus
> 
> -- 
> Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
> Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
> 
>