2562: Formatting Meeting

2022-01-01T15:07:09Z

Sgolson: /* Explanation */ fix what ISO stands for

{{comic
| number = 2562
| date = December 31, 2021
| title = Formatting Meeting
| image = formatting_meeting.png
| titletext = Neither group uses iso 8601 because the big-endian enthusiasts were all at the meeting 20 years ago.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a LOCAL VERSION OF DR SEUSS, WHO IS NOT JONATHAN SWIFT - Needs wikification and consideration of whether there is a relation to new year's eve. Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

In the United States, it's common to write dates numerically in the format ''month/day/year'' -- 2/3/22 means February 3, 2022 (the century is often omitted when it's obvious that the date is around the current time). In Europe, the usual format is ''day/month/year'', so 2/3/22 is 2nd March, 2022.

"Localization" is the technique used in software to make it accept input and display output in the formats most natural to users in their locations. For example, in the United States numbers use commas "," to separate thousands and a decimal point "." to separate the decimal values, while in large areas of the EU it is the reverse. And the textual output will be translated to the local language. Naturally, this also includes displaying dates in the local format, as described above. Note: Currency is only localized where there is a different formatting standard for the same currency (e.g., Canadian English is $1,000.00 and Canadian French is 1 000,00 $). Currency is never "localized" to a different currency as it would actually change the money value (e.g., $100 is not the same as €100) and currency conversion is required, which may be further confounded by fluctuating rates in either the short or long term.

The joke in this comic is that two dates are shown on the same display related to meetings regarding localization. The date of the meeting of the US team is localized in the US format, while the EU team's meeting is localized in the European format, and these two dates about a month apart happen to be formatted the same (there are many such pairs of dates, as long as the day of the month is between 1 and 12). Cueball needs to explain that the European meeting will be a month later than the US meeting, to avoid confusion due to the ambiguity (which is ironic, since localization is intended to reduce confusion).

{{w|ISO-8601}} (that is, standard number 8601 as promulgated by the International Organization for Standardization since 1988) specifies a date format of YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. 2021-12-31), which results in dates being listed in chronological order when sorted stringwise. The ISO format is called "{{w|big-endian}}", which refers to the fact that the largest unit in the date (the year) comes first; the European format is instead "{{w|little-endian}}", while the American format is "{{w|middle-endian}}" (or "mixed-endian") since the unit given first is the one whose size is in the middle. (Regular numerals are also written with the largest place values on the left – for example, the first 2 in 2021 is the thousands place – though whether this convention is big-endian or little-endian depends on whether the numbers are being read in the context of left-to-right or right-to-left text. The "endianness" terms are most often used in reference to whether the address of a value in the computer memory which takes up more than one cell is the location of the most significant or least significant cell, though they originate in a [https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2003/ling538/Lecnotes/ADfn1.htm Jonathan Swift story] about a war over which end of the egg to eat first.) This standard was also mentioned in [[1179: ISO 8601]].

The joke in the title text is that someone attempting to interpret the improperly formatted date as if it were expressed in the standardized ISO-8601 format, might read the date as March 22, 2002, so they went to the meeting almost 20 years ago. Unless the announcement of the meetings was made 2 decades in advance, there's a paradox that these participants would have taken the date from an announcement in the far future. However this interpretation of the date is necessarily incorrect: ISO-8601 format specifies four-digit years, two-digit months, and two-digit days. Therefore "2/3/22” ''cannot'' be an ISO-8601 date, as "2" must be rendered as "0002", and "3" must be "03". Even if the leading zeroes were omitted in violation of ISO-8601, the year would become Year 2, not Year 2002. Since the standard always uses a 4 digit 'YYYY' format in the first field, and no common formatting uses YYYY-DD-MM, any date written in ISO-8601 is easily recognized and (comparatively) unambiguously interpretable as YYYY-MM-DD. Dates written in Y-M-DD or MM-DD-YY or other formats are (officially) formatted improperly.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Cueball sitting next to a screen, which displays]:
:Localization working group
:Upcoming meetings
:<hr>
:US Team: 2/3/22
:EU Team: 2/3/22

:Cueball: And the European formatting and localization team will meet a month later...

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Calendar]]

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2562: Formatting Meeting