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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion: Relative dates are nice ("1 year and 7 months"), but I'd have an easier time reading it with absolute dates as well ("2019-12-34").

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Absolute dates are better for printing out on paper too.

You get the abs date if you hover (it's set as the title attr)

It'd still be nice to not have this tied to hover, relative dates are more useful to get a gist of how long you've got - those absolute dates are usually what you need to sell it to management.

I started with absolute dates, but my primary use-case is “How much time do I have?”, for which relative dates work better.

I’ll see if I can do better.

It can be done as

   1 year 7 days (2020-06-03)

   2020-06-03 (1 year 7 days)

If/when you do absolute days, don’t use US format :) (I don’t know hiw it is right now, can’t hiver on mobile)

Or write out months to make clear which format it is (03 June 2020). That way it's clear for everyone which format was used

It is YYYY-MM-DD

The best and the only true format :)

I wonder why they didn’t use the `<time>` element for this.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

As far as I know, no browser actually does anything special with `<time>` elements. Might be nice for screenreaders though, so I'll see if I can switch.

I don’t know if this has been done but I suppose a good use of the `<time>` element would be for browser addons to target it and use the `datetime` attribute for something like “add to calendar (ical)” or “translate the text content to my locale” or something similar.

Some pages have that, and some don't. The iPhone page doesn't have absolute dates as titles, for example.

iPhones don’t have EOL vs Support dates, so I had to hack around it for the release. Will fix soon.

It's an annoying UX antipattern. It doesn't work on mobile, and forces one to use the mouse instead of just seeing the information in its more useful form.

If anything, why not put the "N days from now" text in the title attr instead?

Not every pattern that is controversial is an anti-pattern. Relative time is useful for a different reason than absolute time. One use case is not worse than the other, they're just different.

That would be fine if I wasn't using my phone.

Mobile phones don’t have hover.

It is already there on hover, but maybe a site-wide dropdown would help.

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