[WirelessGigabit]

Sidenote on showing (or not showing) timestamps.

Consider a page with 10 rows, and in each row you show the relative date.

2 issues with that:

1) If I see a whole page and I see 1 week ago the range is 7 days. If I see 1 year ago the range is 365 days. That is too much for most of the things. 2) If I am on a page without visual indication of sort order and I'm on a page that shows 10 entries with '1 year ago' I have no clue about the sort order.

I hate relative dates.

[Terr_]

To be pedantic, that's not a problem of relatives times as much as the data being lossy vague approximations.

Still, "1 year, 7 months, 2 days, 5 hours, 3 minutes ago" isn't always ideal either, not even when it's done in a lexically sortable way.

Ultimately it boils down to a choice which doesn't match problem the user has, and in different circumstances someone might want relative or absolute.

[WirelessGigabit]

It can be solved by putting in an absolute date. I still don't understand what kind of problem relative dates solved.

[Terr_]

They work when relative-times are part of the question or mental model the user has when approaching the system.

Then the user doesn't have to mentally cross-convert between relative measures and absolute timestamps, which is less error-prone and annoying.