I would have no plan when this was. Just writing the fucking date is the best solution.

Except that saying "1.5 years ago" with a decimal would be 1 year and 6 months ago, and you won't want to do the conversions from a base 10 to base 12 for the month. Just write "October 21, 2020"

Which would be the worst date format. Just use ISO 8601 (2020-10-21) and you could even sort by the date.

Isn’t it nice to see people deduct in real time why many sites use relative timestamps?

For most people, exact time doesn’t even really matter — it’s about estimating a broad chronological context for the most part. I’d just wish the UI would have a universal and easily accessible way to disclose the exact time when I actually need it.

> Isn’t it nice to see people deduct in real time why many sites use relative timestamps?

But that is throwing out the baby with the bath water. The existence of multiple locally used data formats is no reason replace information with this oversimplified nonsense. Browser can and used to provide the locale with every request. That is enough information to format a data such that it is readable to the user.

ISO 8601 is a long document which none of us can read and which specifies A LOT of different formats, including 2023-10-21, +0020231021, 2023-W42, 2023-294, and a lot of others (including duration specifiers).

Citing RFC 3339 is usually a better idea, since in addition to be readable for free, it is limited to the date formats you are thinking about. My 2 cents on your preferred citation, keep preaching though!

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339

With apologies for the delayed response, I got here from the weekly hackernewsletter.