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A while back, I've decided to make time tags dynamic on my website. First of all they have the title tag to show the actual date in UTC. By dynamic I mean, when something is just published, I use relative time that updates in real time. 1 second ago, 2, 3... etc. Then the minutes, then the hours, then daily.

I always get frustrated when I see a 7 months ago, or X years ago, the math is always inconsistent when they round it. So when something is more than 3 days old, I display the actual date.

Take a look at GitHub’s <relative-time> element - works great as a progressive enhancement: https://github.com/github/relative-time-element

Wouldn't it make sense if the content of it could be auto-generated as well for the users' locale directly with no need for JS?

Either as a date in the example "4 days ago" or "in 2 days, 2 hours and 28 seconds" for future events. This requires some control for granularity to control for how precise you want it to be and what to omit.

"a few seconds ago", "3 seconds ago", "less than a minute ago".

Should support a shortform that can act as a countdown timer "00:00:56" or "00:56".

Then write a browser plugin that does these things to the <time> element.

Personally I always use the <time> element when providing date or time. Properly localized with Intl.DateTimeFormat and ISO string formatted in the datetime attribute. I do it mostly because it is free. For a developer writing <time> instead of <span> makes no difference. <time> is easier to target in tests, and maybe my users has a browser plugin that can quickly e.g. add a thing to their day planner app from a <time> element.

It's wild to me that it doesn't even generate a tooltip by default.

I wrote a small custom component using Lit[1] for use on my personal blog[2]. It provides some clever logic around timestamps, showing them in the readers time zone and with their locale formatting. Should that fail, there's a fallback to just plain text. When working with shortened, relative, or whatever else timestamps, the full value is available, in iso 8601, as the title text. I've used them all over the site, and they work rather nicely

A funny story about developing them. I had a friend in India check them to see if they worked on his computer/browser combo, and for a short period of time I was incredibly frustrated at the screenshots he was sending back. They displayed nearly the exact same time as mine, but shifted by half an hour. After a bit of thought, I realized his locale formatting didn't use a meridian indicator, and his time zone was 12:30 different than mine, so 9pm was 9:30 in the morning for him

[1]: https://github.com/paradox460/pdx.su/blob/main/assets%2Fjs%2...

[2]: https://pdx.su

I try to include it whenever possible, and I long for a future where it's universal, so any date shown could be displayed in 8601/3339, and thus never in the five or so random date formats I have to deal with, not including relative ones. I doubt its going to happen though, since even excluding the relative dates, most sites seems to write their dates according to their own locale, which does make sense and is the best option if you're not going to provide any options to the user, and it's the option that makes the least amount of people complain (no American is going to complain about seeing December 19th 2025, and no German is going to complain about 19. Dezember 2025, and not that many are even going to complain about 19.12.2025).

I agree it should do something, which might be configurable by the end user and implementation dependent. For example, a browser might have an option to display the time converted into your preferred time format and time zone. If the operating system environment has some way to specify that some text refers to date/time and can be used with other software in this way, then it would be possible to do that, too.

(My own Scorpion document format is intended to include this capability, as well as the ability to specify other things (e.g. units of measurement, international telephone numbers, how a word is pronounced, languages, etc) to be handled in similar ways, but it is not currently fully defined.)

Similar gripe of mine, why doesnt input `datetime-local` add the timezone on the client side...

> Post published 4 hours ago

Am I the only one who dislikes these relative times and prefers absolute date stamps?

Especially "1 year ago" (for something that was 23 months ago)

It has done nothing for so long that it may now be impossible to make it do something useful.

Tooltips are struggling on mobile.

bring back <blink> more like ittt