[TheAceOfHearts]

I know it's not perfect, but in case you're not aware... Although Github shows you relative time, they use time [0] elements and set the title (which you can see if you hover over the time) to show more detail, e.g. "Jul 2, 2015, 9:13 PM PDT". In addition to that, they set datetime as ISO-8601, e.g. "2015-07-03T04:13:48Z".

If you wanted, you could make a script to always display the expanded information.

A lot of websites do this, and I think it works out very well. It means you can hover over the time if you want something more precise, but the default level of information shown to you is minimized. This is useful for reducing clutter and information overload.

It really depends on what information you're trying to convey, and where it falls within the hierarchy.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

[steveax]

Yep, I know about the title attribute and the hover display. I still disagree with the choice. Why make the user hover to get the precise date? The worst offender is the commits screen. I know that each day's commits section has the full date, but if the commits for a day are longer than the viewport, I find myself scrolling up to find the exact date of the commit (much easier than hitting the small target of the humanized date and waiting for the hover state to appear). I understand that humanized dates are better than ISO-8601 for some things, but commit dates, no, not IMO. "About a month ago" is useless to me.