One little, two little, three little Endian?

The date and time are now, roughly, 13:08, 23rd Jun 2008. Seems correct to you?

It makes no sense.

Why do we habitually mix endian-ness? This is a term used to denote whether the most significant digit (in this case the year) is placed on the left, with successively smaller digits on its right, or on the right, with successively smaller digits on its left. You read 1,234 as 'one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four' (big-endian), not as 'four thousand, three hundred and twenty-one' (little endian). (The name, incidentally, comes from Gulliver's Travels, where two rival factions were at war over which end of a boiled egg should be eaten first).

Big-endian and little-endian make an equal amount of sense - either is an arbitrary choice. Mixed endian-ness, however, makes no sense. No-one these days would say 'one thousand, two hundred, four-and-thirty', because that would be reading the digits out of order. Yet we are happy to do this with dates! Hour:minute:second, day/month/year is small:smaller:smallest, big/bigger/biggest (The US system even more so - 07/11/08 is the 11th July, so the numbers are ordered: bigger/big/biggest!). I, for one, would write the current time as 2008/06/23 13:16:23, which maintains a consistent endian-ness throughout. This blogging software, alas, does not support this option (neither does Microsoft Excel!), even though it is one of only two possible formats which makes logical sense (the other being 23:16:13 07/11/08, which few people would use!).

The same concept applies to domain names, which start little endian (news.bbc.co.uk) up to the first slash, when they magically become big-endian (/sport1/hi/cricket/default.stm). Tim Berners-Lee himself says that he wishes he'd made web-addresses consistently big-endian (e.g. uk.co.bbc.news/sport/) .

It is too late now...