Some years ago in a chain of discussion the more typical simple pyramid representation of date formats was improved to incorporate every (big and) little detail of the various formats accurately.

The annotated regions of usage are debated however.

The first insight is that numbers themselves are ordered most to least significant, that’s why every numeric element is sloped top to bottom. This shows why dd.mm.yyyy is not well-ordered, even ignoring the time component.

Then, am/pm is actually its own segment of the time notation when it is used, and as the biggest is misplaced when put after time.
Put between date and time it is still inefficient, but at least placed in order (and is alphabetically sorted).

Another neat detail is the quirk of 12h time to call the first hour 12 instead of 00. This is represented by the lowest section of the hour bar spiking to be the widest.

One remaining inaccuracy is that the width of the bars does not match their encoded amount of information. It would be sensible to have the day be 5x wider than am/pm, and the (4 digit) years 2.6x as wide as the days, but alas that would be too impractical for such a well-designed infographic.

I inverted the original because I prefer darkmode. Here is the original

I cast retinal damage

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    111·
    1 month ago

    Now remember how fucked-up numbers are represented in different languages, for instance eight-and-twenty in German, and you can shove these nice stacks through the blender once more.

    • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Let’s for the sake of sanity assume these are only ever written down never pronounced.
      Else one and the same notation would perform differently based on who is reading it.

      Germany if memory serves has a minor movement advocating use of “twenty-eight” instead of “eight-and-twenty” for example.

      Edit: English isn’t exactly innocent either with their teens, german at least is consistently inverted. The hundreds and thousands however could be inverted with nine-teen-hundred or could be correct with one-thousand-nine-hundred

        • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          4·
          1 month ago

          “viertel zwölf”

          quarter twelve

          archaic runes I cannot hope to comprehend

          I am however assured by sources it means 11:15

          edit: switched :45 to :15 examle as it is even worse

          • gramie@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            1 month ago

            I think that in some parts of Germany, viertel zwölf means 12:15, but in others it means 11:45. Just to keep things interesting!

            I learned the latter near Frankfurt, 40 years ago, and the former in Eastern Germany this year.

            • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
              3·
              1 month ago

              I think those require a “vor” and “nach” respectively.
              “viertel zwölf” seems to reliably mean 11:15 unless maybe it’s a casual shortening both sides are aware of. If you go to a random person and tell them viertel zwölf they probably won’t understand, but if they do they should think 11:15.

              “viertel zwölf” (quarter twelve) = 11:15
              “viertel vor zwölf” (quarter to twelve) = 11:45
              “viertel nach zwölf” (quarter past twelve) = 12:15

              • gramie@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                1 month ago

                No, these usages specifically don’t use “vor” and “nach”. Presumably idiomatic spoken German