Many places worldwide have adopted the very sensible practice of writing dates as YEAR-MONTH-DAY for the very practical reason that it's the only way that dumb computers can sort them in chronological order. (It only works really well if the numerical representation for the month is used. although some accounting programs can accomodate standard names/abbreviations.)

Since any "date" entered as a date in most programs is recorded in memory only as "Days:Minutes:seconds since some standard date" you usually can "reformat" a selected date to have about anything you want for the "displayed date" if the original information was entered as a date rather than just as a text string.

Apparently dates are of such diminishing importance that most "news reports" (in some places, especially "blog" type columns) on the web no longer include a date, showing only "x minutes ago" since the attention span of most readers doesn't extend longer than about 3 minutes. This is an exceedingly unfortunate practice for those who think historical context is of any significance, and indicates mainly the popularity of illiterate news writers, but there appears to be no way to stop the trend.

John