I see it too often that websites of applications default to the American date format, like 3/21/2026 for March 21, 2026. Even the BIOS/UEFI setup screens in most PCs default to this format. Interestingly enough, BIOS setup screens in the 1990s used month names in letters, like Mar 21, 2026. So they went to a worse date format.
The problem is that for day numbers of 12 or less, the American date format is ambiguous. Most countries outside the USA write dates like this: 21-3-2026. Now suppose it’s March 10, 2026 instead. If we write 3-10-2026 (or 3/10/2026), do you mean March 10 or October 3? Slashes versus dashes does not solve the problem either. Some European countries do write 10/3/2026 for March 10 2026, which is really indistinguishable from the American notation for October 3, 2026. If a document contains only dates with day numbers of 12 of less, it is unclear what the intended dates are. This is unacceptable.
There is a good way to write dates in all-numeric form, that is not ambiguous. This is the ISO format, which is YYYY-MM-DD, The date March 21, 2026 is now written as 2026-03-21. This is exactly the reverse of the customary European format, but it is unambiguous, provided the year is always written with 4 digits, which the ISO standard requires.
Further, the USA is about the only country that still uses 12 hour notation for all-numeric times, for example in formal time tables. Most European countries use 12-hour times in spoken language and informal settings., for example: “Let’s have dinner of quarter past six”. But in an official schedule we will write 18:15 in 24-hour notation. Digital clocks should show times in 24-hour notation when not inside the USA. And we should use 24-hour notation in formal settings. This way we do not have to say AM or PM when ambiguity could arise: for example when there could be meetings both at 08:00 and at 20:00. In 24-hour notation the hour past midnight runs from 00:00 to 00:59. Midnight itself can be denoted both as 24:00 (the very last moment of the old day) and 00:00 (the very first moment of the new day). In 12-hour notation, 12AM and 12PM often get confused. One hour after 11AM is 12PM and not 12AM. 24-hour notation does not have that confusion.
If an event crosses multiple time zones, times should be specified in UTC. But that concept seems to be alien to most American companies, who specify online meeting times in a lot of time zones, but not the one you are in. UTC seems to be well understood in the telecommunications world, but not in aviation.
English is a language that is widely used in Europe in international settings. I mostly write in English, I prefer to have my desktop operating system in English. There really should be an international English locale that defaults to internationally accepted standards like ISO date and time notation, A4 paper size, metric units and temperatures in degrees Celsius. The UK locale comes close, so I select that one when installing an operating system. Of course I need to correct my keyboard layout and time zone manually after that.
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