You want it displayed as “yyyy/mm/dd” so it’s actually “[RTL]dd/mm/yyyy”

RTL invert characters are just for rendering purposes it doesn’t help with sorting also in older systems sometimes it was not supported.

In Arabic we use DD/MM/YYYY but it actually gets written as YYYY/MM/DD since Arabic is written and read from right to left. When the year is dropped the confusing part is not what format is used here but rather does this website/software support RTL or is it just regular unformatted ASCII.

Edit: it’s still not ISO 8601 and it doesn’t solve the sorting issue

I thinks it’s less of the market playing a role and more of being a sign that we are getting even closer.

We do that in Arabic too. It’s called “badal”, a figure of speech where you replace “the whole” with “the part” to emphasize that part’s importance in the context; in this case that would be either where the government is located in the country or where the report originated from.

For example when Arabic news agencies want to refer to the USA’s government they say Washington or the white house. Since that’s usually where the news come from.