Web Design: Relative Date Sucks (2016)

By Xah Lee. Date: .

Web Design: Relative Date Sucks

the fashionable web design date “posted 834 days ago” is fucking annoying.

it began several years ago… around 2008 maybe.

say no to it.

i think, it'll eventually change back, to real dates.

Grok ai explain the origin of relative Date

the Relative Date on web pages, e.g “posted 834 days ago” , when did became popular, and is there a famous coder or framework that started it.

Relative dates on web pages, such as "posted 834 days ago," became a common UX pattern in the mid-to-late 2000s, aligning with the rise of Web 2.0, social media, and dynamic sites emphasizing recency and quick scanning. This shift prioritized human-readable, context-aware time over exact timestamps, making content feel more immediate and conversational. Early adopters included forums, blogs, and platforms like Twitter (launched 2006, using relative times from near its start for tweet timestamps) and Stack Overflow (launched 2008, displaying "X minutes ago" on questions and answers).

No single coder or framework "invented" it, as the concept draws from natural language and cognitive psychology (e.g., easier mental math for "2 hours ago" vs. calculating from "2023-10-26"). However, key contributors helped standardize and popularize it:

  • Ruby on Rails' time_ago_in_words helper: Part of the ActionView DateHelper module, this server-side function (e.g., generating "about 3 days ago") was available in early Rails versions, likely by Rails 1.0 (2005). It influenced many Ruby-based sites, including Basecamp (37signals), which discussed JS enhancements for relative times in a 2009 blog post to support caching while keeping displays dynamic.
  • jQuery Timeago plugin: Created by Ryan McCue (username rmm5t) around 2008 for his site Yarp.com (a commenting platform), this client-side JS library auto-updates fuzzy timestamps (e.g., "4 minutes ago") and became widely adopted for its ease in AJAX-heavy apps. Its first versions appeared in late 2008, with ongoing releases through 2014, powering relative times on countless sites before native browser APIs like Intl.RelativeTimeFormat (2018) took over.

By 2010, libraries like these were ubiquitous, as seen in Stack Overflow questions mimicking the format. The trend exploded with social platforms, where relative dates boost engagement by highlighting fresh content without timezone hassles or format ambiguities (e.g., MM/DD vs. DD/MM). Today, it's a default in most CMS like WordPress plugins and native web components.