Either as a date in the example "4 days ago" or "in 2 days, 2 hours and 28 seconds" for future events. This requires some control for granularity to control for how precise you want it to be and what to omit.
"a few seconds ago", "3 seconds ago", "less than a minute ago".
Should support a shortform that can act as a countdown timer "00:00:56" or "00:56".
Personally I always use the <time> element when providing date or time. Properly localized with Intl.DateTimeFormat and ISO string formatted in the datetime attribute. I do it mostly because it is free. For a developer writing <time> instead of <span> makes no difference. <time> is easier to target in tests, and maybe my users has a browser plugin that can quickly e.g. add a thing to their day planner app from a <time> element.
Am I the only one who dislikes these relative times and prefers absolute date stamps?
Especially "1 year ago" (for something that was 23 months ago)
(My own Scorpion document format is intended to include this capability, as well as the ability to specify other things (e.g. units of measurement, international telephone numbers, how a word is pronounced, languages, etc) to be handled in similar ways, but it is not currently fully defined.)
I always get frustrated when I see a 7 months ago, or X years ago, the math is always inconsistent when they round it. So when something is more than 3 days old, I display the actual date.
What especially makes me angry is dev tools doing this.
No, Github, Circle CI or Google Console [1] and others. I need to see actual timestamps on commits, PRs, merges, logs etc. not the bullshit "7hrs ago" when I'm trying to find out what broke.
[1] At one point a few years back their log viewer would show this. Someone actually implemented it because showing this is more work than actual proper timestamps.
aezart•2d ago