Lately, I have noticed the increased use of this style in presenting dates:
Wired News home page
I have concluded that replacing the slashes with dots is just a typographical fad. A very confusing one. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a standard. I’m not sure.
Being a developer and knowing how hard international date formats can be, my brain is trained to spot oddities. I can perform correct conversions back and forth based on the current context.
Unfortunately, I can’t trust my own heuristics and instincts in all cases:
"My Brain Hurts" by Koushik Dutta (Seattle, WA)
The 12.01.2009 is actually 01.12.2009, or vice versa, depending on where you live.
The site is hosted on Blogger.com. I wonder is this ambigious formatting decision made by the page author, a custom template or by Blogger, now owned by Google?
If you insist on using non-standard date formats, could you at least try to be consistent.