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Comment by dijksterhuis | Hacker News Reader

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dijksterhuis

In frontends I’ve found it useful to have

- relative rendered on page

- actual time stamp / date format in a tooltip over relative

If people want more detail they can hover mouse over the relative date.

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Ugh, I pretty strongly disagree. This has become a common pattern in UIs, so I'm used to it now and I expect it, but I still hate it. At least for me, I agree with the article, I always prefer an exact date over "3 weeks ago". So why make me hover over a tooltip?

Also, I find myself needing to copy and paste information like this every now and then, which a tooltip is horrible for.

why? screen space. "37h" is much short than the date and time of 37 hours ago. of course, if you write out the age like "37 hours ago", that isn't as useful. software doesn't _have_ to do it badly. the most recent version of this that i wrote will say it is Xmins old, but switch to the next unit after reaching 2*next-unit worth of time, so >120mins starts at 2h. then you get to 2d, 2mo (months), 2 years. you can get the full datetime on hover. all this is only in an object listing. when you open an object, you'll see the full date.

Screen space?? We have such large screens now, and yet most of these UIs are much more minimalist than any UI was 20 years ago when most of us were on 1024x768 or maybe 1280x1024 at best. There is zero space excuse for this. It’s simply a fad, born from the Jony Ive fetish for form over function.

Also:

- 2 years ago

- 2021-12-31

How is that a space issue?

>We have such large screens now, and yet most of these UIs are much more minimalist than any UI was 20 years ago

need more room for the ads obviously.

>How is that a space issue?

it's all relative, but in your example you added a new line. Think of this HN comment section with 200 comments on a page and how much scrolling you need to add due to that decision.

Of course, the comment's design up the chain doesn't have this issue. But for horizontal space mobile is still going start to feel cramped when you add a time stamp to the existing:

[name] | 3 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

because resolution means a lot less for mobile due to the smaller screen. Despite the much higher resolution there's less room to do things there due to the orientation and the size needed for readable text.

This can all be addressed with the best of both worlds using responsive design, but it requires smart design that is aligned with a goal of deliveing dense information. As you hinted at, that simply isn't the current goal for modern design. Less "newspaper" where the goal is to fit in information, and more "ad flyer" where the goal is to focus attention on the biggest eye catches and leave little else (except ads) to distract .

Just wanted to say that I put them on two lines to measure them, to illustrate that a simple date stamp is the same if not more compact. I think the relative one is bad, and at best should be the one stuck into the tooltip.

No comment on dates, but my phone has a higher screen resolution than my laptop. That doesn't mean it has more space for UI elements.

I come back to the same page in 2 hours.

2h ago is now wrong unless it refreshes

15:35 is still correct.

Alternatively, the actual date can be rendered on the page and if people want the relative they can hower over.

Rendering relative dates instead of actual is not a good user experience in my opinion.

Personally, if I'm looking at a date at all that's because I want to compare it to another date.

Why it's important for work-related stuff doesn't need explaining, I guess. But this is relevant even for personal matters -- e.g., was this photo taken before a friend's wedding or after, etc.

Given how imprecise relative dates are they are not of much help for that.

And in the case I'm not looking to compare dates, seeing relative dates doesn't really add any value for me either.

Also, it's quite obvious something happened 1, 2, 3 years ago from seeing the actual date.

Another thing about the tooltip is that it makes it harder to copy and paste. At my work I need to copy exact timestamps for postmortems and other investigations, especially to correlate with metrics. For some web pages I have to go to the page source to finally get the fully qualified timestamp.

That’s true, though arguably it would be possible (and useful) to add copy-ability to tooltips (by context menu for example).

So, instead of providing a date on the page we've now arrived at

- a tooltip

- that has to be made copyable

- by a context menu

This is about when you want to have both representations (either can be useful depending on the situation) but don’t really have the space to display both (such as for comments here on HN). This is why tooltips exist at all, to display additional information that you don’t want to be displayed all the time. In addition, I’ve been wanting to copy the contents tooltips in other situations as well.

I agree and enjoy this, but I'm old and use mostly a computer where I have a mouse to hover with. I don't even know HOW to do that on mobile.

Long-press, usually, which kind of conflicts with right click at the same time...

Not sure at all about tooltips/hover.

This is what I did for a job code challenge - relative casual time in the main description, and then complete time details under the item: https://imgur.com/qG0US5o

OTOH I'm still looking for a job, so YMMV ;)

I want actual time stamp / date format rendered on page. The relative is completely useless and I do not want to have to hover over everything to see the dates.

Just use the date. Enough of this nonsense.

What about on mobile?

Long press brings up tooltips in iOS. Perhaps in Android too.

That's only if the text isn't also a link. For example, on hacker news, the time is also a link. So long press shows the preview of the link instead of tooltip on iOS.

Make it a “hidden” link or something like on discord maybe?

Edit — I’m not a frontend dev. I shall defer to their expertise in said matters.

If it's not a link then open the tooltip on tap.

And I'm not sure it should be a link. Using the displayed time for a permanent link to a post - while ubiquitous - is a weird UI hack.

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