Interesting to call this the "european date format", given that prior to ISO 8601 I'm pretty sure this date order was almost entirely used in East Asia and not Europe. To me day-month-year will always be the European date order.
Please don't use dd-mm-yyyy. It's better to use different separators to clarify the date format. The three common formats are yyyy-mm-dd, dd.mm.yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy.
I wasn't listing a date format, but a date order; the dashes were not meant to be separators. That said, I tend to use year-month-day, in RFC-3339 format. Although I honestly don't lose sleep about it.
> It's better to use different separators to clarify the date format. The three common formats are yyyy-mm-dd, dd.mm.yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy.
As an American, I most commonly see day-month-year written as "April 17th, 2025" or "4/17/2025". I'm sure "4.17.2025" exists, but e.g. it is not what a locale-aware date formatter will output for U.S. locale.
Here's my hot take: One should generally either use locale-specific date formatting, or use RFC 3339 or ISO 8601. They both have a time and a place where they are more appropriate. Sometimes it's just simply going to be more correct and less confusing to use a locale-specific date format, especially if you have to deal with passing dates between different entities. (As an example, if I were filing legal documents, I would most assuredly use the standard in a given locale for dates. Maybe a long, unambiguous form just to be safe, if it happens to be applicable.) In any case, using another option that isn't either of these seems counter-productive to me.
I think it's weird how people get overly attached to issues like these. It is a shame that date formats can be ambiguous, occasionally causing preventable problems, but we'll survive. Stuff like this doesn't get fixed over night.