61–70 of 163 posts
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
Not everything is written at a given point in time and then forgotten about. There are many texts that are continuously updated over years and even decades.
I think timestamps are even more important in that case.
Of course using a timestamp can also cause troubles. Newsmax reported that PBS knew about the assault on the capitol before it even happened because they put a timestamp on their web page for the Trump congregation when they first published it early in the morning. They then proceeded to update the page without updating the timestamp, making it look like they predicted the invasion hours in advance
> Safari, like most modern browsers hide most of the URL by default. What other modern browser does this? Tested both Firefox and Chromium and neither did.
Ironically the blog post is missing a timestamp.
For public stuff, dates help others judge whether the information still applies. This matters for most types of information, but particularly technical advice. I write about German bureaucracy and a lot of the information from a few years ago is outdated.
For private stuff, dates gice you a sense of time. A good example is if you've been writing about a weird lump on your neck hurting for over 4 weeks, or realise that you were stressing about the same things a year ago. Sometimes it's just nice to see "on this day" trivia about yourself.
If you have the date, you can correlate data from different sources onto a single timeline. I made a nice project out of that: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
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 People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them.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…
Addendum: don’t rely on your git/wiki/document-system for tracking the timestamp. “This was accurate on $DATE” has a very different meaning than “this document was last edited on $DATE”. It might be 2 years out of date but someone fixed a typo last week. Just put a sentence/textbox somewhere with the date. If someone does a proper update, they will proudly edit that sentence too.
Or it might have had a fuller update last week, but from older information (perhaps going from years old to months old) because it is information that has a high processing latency (like census data). Though in this case the date probably belongs in the text with the timestamp representing the edit date, either way both times should be made clear.
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
Phones have small screens, and most browsers only show the URL on demand when you do a gesture. Also, you generally can't fit the whole URL while in landscape on a phone. You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it. I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.
> You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it.
> I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.
That's because it's implemented inconveniently, a single line. When user taps the address bar, the browser could expand it into an URL editor, conveniently wrapping lines by url parameter boundaries, etc
I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
Of course, you should always have the option to see the full URL, but why exactly do you need that clutter on display the whole time? It’s like complaining that the browser renders HTML instead of printing it all as unformatted text.
Ironically the blog post is missing a timestamp.
It shows "2023-11-15" below the title for me.
When pressed about this particular time detail, ChatGPT elaborates: While "YYYY-MM-DD" is a common date format, it's not complete for a timestamp, which typically includes both date and time information. A complete timestamp might look like "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss" to include hours, minutes, and seconds.
So, no, this post doesn't contain a timestamp, and it already fails in its own advice.