On: Why you should not be displaying relative dates.

[jere]

I think a bigger problem is absolute dates with no year; I've seen this on blog posts and comments (can't remember any examples right now though).

At first, I'm tempted to think "oh that must be from this year then", but I'm often wrong and it's just a floating date.

[mmcnickle → jere]

I find a frustrating number of sites don't put any date on their articles/posts. Everything on the web should have a visible date somewhere.

[marsvskittens → jere]

Equally frustrating is when dates are displayed without the weekday, especially when trying to schedule an event. "August 30 2012? Wait, is that a Tuesday or a Wednesday?"

Hopefully the <time> element catches on, so I can make my browser display dates however I like.

[untog → marsvskittens]

Personally I think that's an event only argument. I couldn't care less what day of the week a blog post was written, for example.

[MartinCron → untog]

That's a good example about why there's no one-size-fits-all approach to displaying dates and/or date intervals. I care what day of the week I fly. I care if someone commented on my picture 2 minutes or two hours ago. I don't care about the local timezone of someone else's server.

[aaronpk → untog]

Great point about displaying event dates. I think there should be some display guidelines based on the type of content the date is describing.

[jlcx → jere]

Here's one that has confused me: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/