Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.
Use Timestamps
91–100 of 163 posts
Re: Use Timestamps
#92A and element exists in HTML, but why don't an element exists that will format a date and time written in a specific format to the format of what the user want? I'm talking about automatic TZ conversion.
Can the browser always infer what the user wants?
For example, sometimes I mostly care about when, in relation to my local time (and in particular how long ago) something was written; other times, the local time of the event happening is relevant too (e.g. “did this happen before or after markets close in the country where it happened”).
Re: Use Timestamps
#93Dan Luu famously doesn't have timestamps on the blog posts, like https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ There is date on the index page Jan - 2016, however it's not obvious from the content page. I think the argument is that the content should be corrected if it's outdated. So, it shouldn't matter when it was written.
That’s ambitious, but entirely unrealistic in many cases.
For one thing, people do screenshot/download/archive web sites; these copies don’t get updated, and it can be important to know when they were last updated (as opposed to when the snapshot was created by a third party).
Re: Use Timestamps
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need timestamps with time zone to track Elon.
Maybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.
Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.
Re: Use Timestamps
#95When I was doing research, I was bothered by the date not being anywhere in papers (PDFs).
You'd have to search the title of the paper with the names of the authors on the internet, figure out which version you are reading and find out the year of the publication using dblp [1] or finding out in which journal or conference it was published.
Yet, it's so important to actually know when something was written.
Re: Use Timestamps
#96Few things irk me as much as systems that show you "N hours/minutes/seconds ago" instead of the timestamp. GitHub for example, of all systems, should know better. Trying to write up a report of any sort and not having access to accurate timestamps is very annoying.
I'm with you.
It's usually possible to hover the thing to have the actual timestamp show in a tooltip, but this is so clunky.
Re: Use Timestamps
#97I’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.
I've found that keeping a changelog as part of my design docs and similar is a good way to keep engineers, even across teams, confident that what they are looking at is up to date and a good reference, and the right document to update if necessary.
Re: Use Timestamps
#98Use human readable dates:
Every blog post should include a human readable date. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. Timestamps are hard to read.
Use date and time:
Every blog post should include the time it has been created. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline. I was reading Jan Kremers post about blog timestamps and it was not immediately clear to me what time the post was created. Only when I did a look into the HTML source I discovered the time there.
Re: Use Timestamps
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.
Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.
Relativity is the least of your concerns when different planets have different length "hours"
Re: Use Timestamps
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Then browsers should make the url more visible and distinctive. Colorize URL elements, etc.
For what purpose?