The <time> Element Should Do Something
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The debate rages on about the `<time>` HTML element's lack of functionality, with some commenters lamenting its inability to automatically generate tooltips or locale-specific date formats. While some, like riggsdk, suggest that the element should auto-generate content like "4 days ago" for users, others, like Aardwolf, confess to preferring absolute date stamps over relative times. The discussion reveals a nuanced divide, with duskwuff noting that relative times are useful for recent events but should "decay" into absolute times for older ones, a sentiment echoed and disputed by various commenters. As xanthor wryly observes, the `<time>` element's long-standing inertia may now make it too entrenched to change.
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Dec 15, 2025 at 7:09 PM EST
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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)
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
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.
Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I genuinely can't tell if everyone kind of universally hates them or if this is one of those things where my brain just works differently than a lot of other people.
Having thought through a bunch of different orders of magnitude of time (time in the past measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years), I'm confident that I'd personally find the actual date and time to be more intuitive in every single one of them. What I'm not confident in is whether that would be the case for everyone else or not. I don't think there would be anything wrong with someone feeling differently than me, and if it turns out I'm in the minority, I wouldn't have any trouble accepting it, but it feels so fundamentally disconnected with the way I think about things that I have trouble conceiving of it other than as a hypothetical.
I don't think you're missing anything about the timestamps, I think you're missing something about people. :)
Most people can't parse `2025-12-19T16:28:09+00:00` and think "31 seconds ago".
What especially makes me angry is dev tools doing this.
No, Github, Circle CI or Google Console [1] and others. I need to see actual timestamps on commits, PRs, merges, logs etc. not the bullshit "7hrs ago" when I'm trying to find out what broke.
[1] At one point a few years back their log viewer would show this. Someone actually implemented it because showing this is more work than actual proper timestamps.
Either as a date in the example "4 days ago" or "in 2 days" for future events. Maybe control granularity: "a few seconds ago", "3 seconds ago", "less than a minute ago".
Or perhaps in very shortform that can act as a countdown timer "00:00:56" or "00:56".
[1]: https://github.com/paradox460/pdx.su/blob/main/assets%2Fjs%2... [2]: https://pdx.su
(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.)
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.