4 ms·

One notable addition: relative time is the same for everyone. What I mean by this is that instead of messing with timezones (by trying to guess the user's time

One notable addition: relative time is the same for everyone. What I mean by this is that instead of messing with timezones (by trying to guess the user's timezone or even worse, asking for it) in most cases it is sufficient to tell the user something has happened x hours ago, or y days ago. If you're programming in PHP, I can recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/architects-Guide-Date-Time-Programming/dp/0981034500 http://www.amazon.com/architects-Guide-Date-Time-Programming...

derefr 15y ago
I'm really quite fond of Reddit's convention of specifying that the site will go down for maintenance "when this post is X hours old" made as a self-post (where all posts have a relative timestamp like you're talking about as standard metadata.) It's the only time I don't have to do any mental calculations to figure out when the thing's going to happen.
codyrobbins 15y ago
Ugh, I feel that this is one of the single poorest time-related pratices—from a UX perspective—short of not displaying the time at all. Please don’t follow this advice. It makes it really easy for the developer because there’s no need to deal with time zones and things like DST. However, showing a relative time in many situations is completely opaque. If something happened ‘14 hours ago’, did it happen at lunch time or 3 PM? A lot of times people want to know the time of day something happened, not just how long ago it occurred. Here you can do some arithmetic in your head to figure it out, but that’s a major annoyance. And once the relative time flips over to ‘X days ago’ the time information is completely lost. Similarly if it says ‘About 3 months ago’ it’s impossible to know if that means March 15 or April 1 or April 15 or anywhere in between, never mind the time of day. At the very least the full date and time should be displayed in a tooltip so that it’s available if needed. Ideally relative times shouldn’t be used alone except in situations where the relative time is absolutely, unarguably the only information that could ever need to be known.
- wvenable 15y ago
  I agree! And one of the more useful things you can do with a web app is render time using JavaScript (with an appropriate fallback) and then it will show the timestamp in the user's timezone automatically.

derefr 15y ago

I'm really quite fond of Reddit's convention of specifying that the site will go down for maintenance "when this post is X hours old" made as a self-post (where all posts have a relative timestamp like you're talking about as standard metadata.) It's the only time I don't have to do any mental calculations to figure out when the thing's going to happen.

codyrobbins 15y ago

Ugh, I feel that this is one of the single poorest time-related pratices—from a UX perspective—short of not displaying the time at all. Please don’t follow this advice. It makes it really easy for the developer because there’s no need to deal with time zones and things like DST. However, showing a relative time in many situations is completely opaque. If something happened ‘14 hours ago’, did it happen at lunch time or 3 PM? A lot of times people want to know the time of day something happened, not just how long ago it occurred. Here you can do some arithmetic in your head to figure it out, but that’s a major annoyance. And once the relative time flips over to ‘X days ago’ the time information is completely lost. Similarly if it says ‘About 3 months ago’ it’s impossible to know if that means March 15 or April 1 or April 15 or anywhere in between, never mind the time of day. At the very least the full date and time should be displayed in a tooltip so that it’s available if needed. Ideally relative times shouldn’t be used alone except in situations where the relative time is absolutely, unarguably the only information that could ever need to be known.

wvenable 15y ago
I agree! And one of the more useful things you can do with a web app is render time using JavaScript (with an appropriate fallback) and then it will show the timestamp in the user's timezone automatically.