Standards are letters to strangers

Writing 2026-10-09 instead of 10/09/26 isn’t about looks. It’s that nobody, and no machine, can misread it.

That’s what a standard is: a letter to people you will never meet. Maybe a classmate in another country, maybe you in three years, maybe a screen reader. Following it is being polite to them in advance.

This site tries to:

• Write every time in ISO 8601. The Timestamps tool also tells you which week it is (the ISO week, starting on Monday).
• Check color contrast against WCAG; the Color tool does the math.
• Use <button> for buttons, <a> for links and <label> for form fields, and respect the system’s “reduce motion” setting in animations.
• Use v7 for new UUIDs (RFC 9562), because they sort by time, which database indexes like.

And a small quiz, the same component future course notes will use: