: Dates in USA for the normal user I am from Europe. I am confused about dates in USA. I have seen different ways to show the date in USA: Rss feed: Thu, 15 August 2017 Schema and Sitemap:

@BetL925

In the US date formats, the month comes first, followed by the day followed by the year. Any of these would be most easily understood by US visitors:


August 15, 2017
Aug 15, 2017
8/15/2017


Putting the day first will sound a bit awkward to those in the US, but as long as you spell out the month name, those of us in the US would be able to understand:


15 August 2017
15 Aug 2017


As a programmer, I love the YYYY-MM-DD format. It makes the dates easy to sort. Even alphabetical order sorts them correctly. Almost nobody uses YYYY-DD-MM, so there isn't confusion about which field is the month and which is the day. However, that date format is almost never used in the US on something that is meant to be human readable.

Since websites are used by visitors from around the world that use different date conventions, it is sometimes best not to show dates at all. In some cases you might be able to replace dates with durations. Say "one year ago" rather than "May 1, 2016". That is what this site (StackExchange) does to show when items were posted. The technique may be less applicable when the date is an upcoming event for which the user needs to know the exact date and time when it will happen.

It is also possible to format dates for users in a locale aware manner. It could be possible to do so server side. The users location could be detected using either geo-ip address lookups, or the accept-language HTTP header. Most programming languages have libraries available for printing dates for various locales. It could also be done client side in JavaScript: Display date/time in user's locale format and time offset

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