Time: local, GMT or time difference (neo-dzygn-com)

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Time: local, GMT or time difference

Joshua Hore pointed out that the datetime string used in NiceTitles - for ins and del tags - looks rather cumbersome (if I may put it like this). This made me wondering what the desired date/time should look like.

There are three ways of showing date/time. These are local time, GMT and time difference from GMT. The problem with local time is that you'll get a Dutch date (names of months and weekdays) when visiting an English site. It's not an option to convert the time only to local time, because it could well be another day (11pm GMT is 5am in Taiwan). If you display the time in GMT, you'll have to calculate what time in your timezone that is. If you use the time difference from GMT, the calculation is only made easier.

So perhaps we should try something else? Dunstan published a good alternative less than a week ago. This seems to be a good solution, except that you don't know the exact date/time.

What about a combination of the two? In large letters we add: "Added 2 days, 6 hours and 9 minutes ago". Then, a bit smaller: "Tue Jan 13 2004 12:26 GMT".

I'll see what comments I get here and then I'll change NiceTitles, if necessary.

Comments

1. Joshua Hore wrote:

   Sorry, I must not have made myself clear.
   The problem I’m having is it’s displaying the time as it is in the “datetime” attribute (ie. local time to author), but then tacking on my local offset/timezone without converting it, giving an incorrect date and time, which could lead to confusion.

   January 16, 2004 @ 1:23 am. Type: Comment. Permalink.

2. Mark wrote:

   You’ve made yourself perfectly clear. I guess I did not make clear what you meant. While I was trying to find a better alternative for the way the time is currently displayed, I ran into the problem described in this post. What alternative do you want to use?

   January 16, 2004 @ 3:59 pm. Type: Comment. Permalink.

3. Joshua Hore wrote:

   I don’t have a problem with the way the date and time is displayed, I would just like the date and time to be displayed correctly.
   Although I do like the idea of “time since”.

   January 17, 2004 @ 1:14 am. Type: Comment. Permalink.

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