A date is a date. How different can it be around the world? If you think that, you'll probably be surprised by this article. Dates are formatted differently around the world, and if you are not careful in how you write them in your website, your web pages may confuse your readers and even cause serious misunderstanding.

The Diversity of Numeric Date Formats Take a date like 8.5.2008.

Depending on the part of the world you're in, that date can mean August 5, 2008 or 8 May 2008. If you have ever seen the variety of date formatting options in your operating system (be it Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or otherwise), where dates can be formatted MM/DD/YY, DD/MM/YY or even YYYY/MM/DD, you'll know what I mean.

Numeric date formats are ambiguous if you're publishing a website. Websites are unlike your local newspaper. When you publish a site or a blog, you have an international audience -- you are automatically speaking to the whole world. Your visitors or customers are probably accustomed to their local date formats, and when they encounter your site, they will instinctively read your dates in the format they are used to. To avoid misunderstanding and confusion, it's best to write your dates in a way that will be interpreted correctly, no matter where those readers come from.The simplest way to write dates that can be understood by anyone in the world is to spell out the month portion of the date. For example, say "August 5, 2008" or "5 August 2008" instead of 8.5.2008 or 5.8.2008. When you spell out the month, your dates are instantly unambiguous. It doesn't matter if the numbers for day come before the month ("5 August 2008") or after ("August 5, 2008"). Use whichever arrangement you're most familiar with in your country; the moment you spell out the month, that date can no longer be misinterpreted.

Some people don't want to spell the month because they fear that it makes their dates understandable only by people who read the language the date is written in. That argument, however, doesn't make sense. No matter how you look at it, your site will always be written in a particular language. Spell the month out in the language that the rest of your web page is in.

If your visitors can read the rest of the web page in that language, they can also read the date. Otherwise, they aren't even going to look at your date anyway. If you are one of those who insist on using a numeric date, I think that the numeric date format that yields the least ambiguity is the YYYYMMDD format. That is, a date like 20080805 (or better, 2008-08-05) is probably going to be interpreted by most people as 5 August 2008. I have encountered a few perverse people who insist that "20080805" can also mean "20 August 0805", but unless you're writing a site that describes historical events or you cater to a highly pedantic audience, this particular numeric format also seems to be quite usable. I personally feel, though, that a date like "August 5, 2008" or "5 August 2008" is much easier to read (and faster to visually scan) than a string of digits