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Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right? ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
For proper ordering for one. ISO8601 is objectively the best way to label anything that might need to be ordered based on time. This forces data points to line up properly in chronological order, and makes it easy to time slice as needed.
And why are the pieces of the pyramid made so the ISO standard is the only one that looks right?
Because it's the only one that goes from largest value to smallest. It's first because you start from the largest as the base (year) and work down through size to seconds.
ss:mm:hh:DD:MM:YYYY would also order the numbers based on length, but would look terrible if represented like that
Agreed. And any sort of data analysis would be so much harder
Arent there uses other than ordering files?
The ISO standard is best for ordering files, but that doesnt mean its good for other things
Its impossible to confuse it with the other 2 presented in this post so you could use it for files and use another one for other things
Edit: i may have been misunderstanding the context in which the ISO standard is claimed to be superior
The fact that you can't confuse it with other formats is precisely the advantage. With any other format (besides the awful lettered month) you have to use context clues to be sure you're reading it correctly if the day is less than 13.
Europe: 10/12/2025 USA: 12/10/2025 If you don’t have context as to which system this is, would 2025/12/10 make things less ambiguous?
To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don't think I've ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that's not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.
Why would the year, the least important, need to be first?
Maybe it's not least important for everyone?
Almost like the preference can change depending on application...
If I'm looking at a folder full of spreadsheets, one each month (or even day) for several years, and they are all titled according to YYYY-MM-DD. All you need to do is sort by filename and now you have it broken down by year, into one spreadsheet per month/day.
And only needed to click one button to sort them into an easily readable format.
Well you read the least frequently changing part first, the year, because if you read the seconds first, then the thing's already changed before you've even finished reading it. /s
What about evenly distancing the 3 shortest time intervals to promote fast reading
mm:DD:MM:ss:YYYY:hh
I often see the year being the most important in my archive. Followed by month, then day (which is often left out because the document is monthly).
And the why; because it sorts alphabetically.
You can skip the year and just do 1-26
Sometimes you need the year
Yeah it's funny seeing everyone in here thinking only of the one specific thing they use this for, not recognizing that the most useful order can change depending on the purpose of the data.