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This cannot ever work. Give it up. Only the ISO yyyy-mm-dd format is unambiguous.

If a user sees some random date, such as 3/4/xxxx, they have absolutely no way to distinguish if this is in their format or not.

If you're in the US, you might assume that this is in your backwards M/D/Y format, meaning it's April 3rd, and you'd be right much of the time.

However, if you're outside the US, then there are two indistinguishable possibilities:

It's a US server ignoring your time format, so this date represents April 3rd.

OR

It's a server correctly showing you a date in your preferred format, so it's actually the 4th of March.

At a glance, these aren't distinguishable. I easily click through 200-500 pages a day! I'm not going to sit down and try to work out which of those hundreds of pages a day, and thousands of pages a week are designed for humans, or just Americans.




If a user sees some random date, such as 3/4/xxxx, they have absolutely no way to distinguish if this is in their format or not.

If you're in the US, you might assume that this is in your backwards M/D/Y format, meaning it's April 3rd, and you'd be right much of the time.

If I, in the US, see 3/4/xxxx, its meaning is March 4th, definitely not April 3rd.

But the fact that you got your example wrong only proves your overall point that it's a mess!




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