121–130 of 163 posts
Totally agree with the author here. But I'll go one step further. Anywhere a time or date is shown, it should also show corresponding time zone. It's maddening to see a time in any UX and not know what time zone it's in. And YES, a date shown on its own needs a time zone!
Genuinely curious as to why knowing the timezone instead of approximate date matters so much.
I’ve found that internal documentation is a great place to put timestamps. People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them. Instead, consider making whatever documentation seems useful at a given moment and timestamp it with a clear, prominent “this was accurate on yyyy-mm-dd”. It will still be useful a year lat…
Every project needs someone responsible for someone taking ownership of the documentation, including research and timestamping and the like. Have a todo list where the oldest document goes on top, check it for relevance and accuracy, cull it if it's outdated, get it up to date otherwise, and (as this comment recommends) update the timestamp.
My current project has a wiki going back years, loads of duplicate information, no clues whatsoever if it's still relevant.
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That's a nice idea. I can think of at least one person that this would be useful for (Elon Musk, 2023).
I think we'd better refer to month level, cuz (Elon 2023.11) change faster. :)
>should include a timestamp. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. This was one of the ideas in the General Semantics philisophy. You don't much hear about it nowadays, it's a pre-war thing. One of the tenants was that you should date expressions. For example, if referring to a person, you'd write "Roosevelt, 1930" because a year later, Roosevelt may behave like a different person altogeth…
That's a nice idea. I can think of at least one person that this would be useful for (Elon Musk, 2023).
Totally agree with the author here. But I'll go one step further. Anywhere a time or date is shown, it should also show corresponding time zone. It's maddening to see a time in any UX and not know what time zone it's in. And YES, a date shown on its own needs a time zone!
Why? Is it pertinent that you know that the thing was posted in CST and not UTC? Genuinely curious as to why knowing the timezone instead of approximate date matters so much.
I am talking about having a UX date/time standard for all of UX, not just blogs.
There is UX where knowing timezone is critical, ex: when analyzing logs, breaking news etc.
To keep things simple it would be great if everyone agreed to always attach TZ info to any date or time shown.
Furthermore, any blog/article that might not appear important at the time it's posted, might become important DUE to breaking news. So just put timezones everywhere an be done with it :)
Give context in titles. (The post is a size of a tweet about using them on publications.) Don't make me click to see if I might be interested in opening this content. Dropping timestamps is very akin to using terse catchy titles, it draws in the unsuspecting and gives content wider/longer exposure.
Normally I would agree with you, but the "In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline." is implied by the generality of the title.
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
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Plus, it sorts naturally. Starting with the day or the month is Ludacris.
Day I can accept, even if I dislike it. Starting with the month will always make me angry. It just has no logic to it.
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
People with technical skills can't accept that, but the ones without them that make up the majority couldn't care less. The vast majority of people don't know how to read or utilize anything past the domain name, hence why you constantly see people copy paste 300 characters long URLs of images from Google. Hell, a good amount of people don't even look at the domain name which is why phishing is so common.
Marginalizing URLs as something that only "people with technical skills" do (and/or should?) care about is no different from any other phenomenon where you take some boring, everyday, mostly unremarkable practice that doesn't involve the use of a computer and then change it where the moment someone gets a whiff of the presence of a computer in the pipeline they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know"/"I don't get this"/"I'm not a computer person".
It's really the doing of both non-technical people and technical people in and adjacent to the modern software industry alike that most people consider URLs gobbledygook instead of what they are: identifiers for a given work. It's especially perverse that the practices of both classes are responsible for most URLs being unsuitable for use Works Cited pages. That could definitely use some fixing, but we do such a poor job (in the US at least) already at explaining, during high school when it's supposed to be covered, the value of proper sourcing and citing that even smart kids come away thinking in terms of superficialities like the rigidity of formats and citation style rather than the actual fundamentals of scholarship. URLs are not exceptional in that regard.