Stop using relative date and time!

Dear UI/UX designers, I know relative dates like 5y, or 7h ago are shorter and sweeter than ISO date time format. But please stop using relative dates and times!

I got your attention. In fact I will just share some insight you might want to know about when choosing what is the right format for showing date and time.

Some years ago I have printed an online article about archeology I found interesting. Today I wanted to find it again online but couldn’t. So I wanted to narrow the search by time. Unfortunately the article didn’t contain precise date when it was written, but a message stating “4y ago”. I don’t remember when I printed it precisely, so I don’t know when it was written.

It goes beyond that. If you want to place events in a chronological order, but you are presented with relative dates and times you have to do the manual work of calculating the absolute time.

And if you want to order stuff chronogically including months? 4 years ago is not good enough. I want to know precise month and day!

We all know that date and time is saved in databases in absolute values. By presenting stripped down, relative time we are loosing that information. Moreover, if the page is cached, there is an additional risk, it will be wrong when the page will be seen by the user.

So why to put date anyways, if it is confusing? Maybe remove it altogether? I see this approach often lately. Especially to do a thing called evergreen content…