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.
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.
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.