This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Dmitry Dvoinikov.
Original Post: Displaying date/time values in relative human readable format
Feed Title: Things That Require Further Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThingsThatRequireFurtherThinking
Feed Description: Once your species has evolved language, and you have learned language, [...] and you have something to say, [...] it doesn't take much time, energy and effort to say it. The hard part of course is having something interesting to say.
-- Geoffrey Miller
A typical problem which universally appears in any interactive software is displaying date and time. A typical web page contains articles post times, a phone displays times of calls and short messages and so on and so forth.
Too often the developers don't bother with readability and we see something like
Posted Wednesday 1/12/2000 11:02:15 AM
whereas the American M/D/Y date and 12-hour AM/PM time format is even not universally recognized. Besides, more often it is not necessary to have it so detailed. Seconds, for instance, who ever needs them ? Security auditors ? Are you one of them ? A better way of displaying the same information is having only the relevant parts of it displayed:
Posted 11:02 AM (when posted the same day) Posted 1/12/2000 (when posted days ago and time of day is not relevant)
And even better is to use relative user-readable form:
Posted 3 minutes ago Posted 2 hours ago Posted yesterday at 11:02 PM Posted yesterday at 23:02 (tip to the hat for respecting locale)
Such format is user friendly, but why don't we see it often ? Surprise - because you have to implement it and it is not trivial. Instead of just
strftime("%M/%D/%Y");
you have to jump through hoops, the easiest being depending on external 3rd party library.
And this is my question: why don't we standardize some percent-format which would display date and time in printable relative form ? We already have strftime printing days of week names, month names (short and long), is it possible to have something like
strftime("%R");
to produce a human readable date-time relative to current time ? Or even have a small language in it, such as
strftime("%RD"); (produces "today" or "yesterday" or "2 days ago") strftime("%RM"); (produces "this month" or "last month" or "2 months ago")
Previous Topic
