Standardisation
2020–06–26
Recently on my mom’s birthday, I finally got myself an instant camera. Thank God the picture prints are very nice and better than I expected.
After getting my first ever prints, I was trying to write the dates on them. It is only a “date”, but then I wondered, what is the actual, proper date format?
Date Format
These are the three types of normal separator that popped out in my head, I was thinking, which one is the right one?
- Slash → 26/06/2020
- Hyphen → 26–06–2020
- Dot → 26.06.2020
With a brief search, it led me to ISO 8601, which you saw similar on the diary entry date below the title: 2020-06-26. As I was writing this, I raised my eyebrow when Medium automatically converts my hyphens into the longer dashes (2020–06–26). It turns out that en dashes are used in between number ranges, such as from year/number 2015–2016.
After meddling with things like above, it struck me that I am a sucker for standardisation as a whole, basically in anything. As I’m communicating with people from other countries in my work, in the past I had some quick research as well about currency formats, which I will briefly discuss below.
Currency Format
First, there is an ISO standard for the currency codes, with the popular ones like USD, EUR, and JPY.
Second, there are various kinds of decimal formats globally, which are mainly divided into two, in this case the example will be one thousand three hundred and thirty cents:
- 1.300,30
- 1,300.30
Last but not least, the position of the number and its currency codes, which is surprisingly not mentioned in the ISO standards (ISO 4217). However, it was mentioned in the European Union publication office, which depends on the native language of the text. For English, it should be before the number: EUR 30. For others like German and Italian, it’s 30 EUR.
This is officially my first piece of short writing to be published online. I guess as it happens to many people, it’s one of the things I would like to do, but I’ve been putting it off for various reasons. Perfectionism and laziness are definitely the main culprit though.
There would be no common theme to start, I’d be writing anything that’s popping out in my head from time to time.
Huge thanks for stopping by :)
