I’m sure responsibility is variable but kinda sounds like could be a political issue rather than skill at least sometimes. They might be requesting data from elsewhere that comes to them all jumbled. And no authority to demand changes from the source.

Sometimes the chaotic sorting is very intentional, as with amazon. Cory Doctorow has written about how the sorting is one piece of their overall scheme: Amazon is a ripoff (06 Nov 2023)

Though once in a while I get prices sorted like $1 $10 $2 $200… If the coder was motivated they could’ve done better.

Anything with time sensitivity, context or relation to other events.

Haven’t you ever read something very differently that was written Jan 2020 compared to April 2020? They’re both “5 years ago”. Or sometimes people will reference current events in passing. If someone mentions “what trump just did” you need to know with more granularity than 1 year to understand.

More mundanely, “Indiana stinks this time of year” is meaningless without knowing the date.

I disagree with your premise that web developers “want to make it hard”, as that isn’t the motivation.

Yes that is fair enough it is unlikely to be a correct characterization. I was just annoyed and feeling persecuted by people who make a great platform that I love using.

If I had to make a general rule I would say relative dates for recent but precise for older. “1 hour” is good enough in a lot of cases but “2 years” is too vague.

A fancier UI could have a user setting for what dates to display, or if you click the date it changes to the other format. Maybe even for all dates on the page so it could be quickly toggled. Or clicking the date selects/copies it.

Admittedly a very marginal use case so for a small software, might not be a good use of time.

I think text on the page should be selectable but tooltips should not. Although I do generally appreciate lemmy’s overall use of user-select: none because it omits all the little icons like voting and reply which are unlikely needed and clutter up destination text file. I don’t always love how it skips the link icon because then I need to copy it separately. (Combining the timestamp with the link in the way of old blog trackbacks is still logical.)

I disagree that this software could be functional without some way to show the date. That is a basic functionality.

Having to hover over each individual comment or post rather than displaying on the page means it’s obscured. You can’t see it unless you do something, and then you can only see it for a moment. Even if you want to manually transcribe the date, you can’t type in one window and have that tooltip active in the other so you need to go back and forth unless you can memorize the whole thing at once.

Whether it is a good design decision as is another matter, I can see why you wouldn’t want the full date/time displayed in all situations. Maybe I’m just a freak for wanting to copy the dates.

Nice investigation. :)

If you will go as far back as LJ and phpBB I wouldn’t expect the dates to be relative because it would be extra work for the server. You would have to generate all the dates every time the page loaded? Using… perl? Sounds too demanding. And since everyone was browsing from a computer, not a tiny phone, screen real estate wasn’t at such a premium.

For disallowing selection, the support for user-select has only recently become fully supported across the board.

Fantastic I look forward to it.

I had a quick peek at the style.css:

.user-select-none{
    -webkit-user-select:none!important;
    -moz-user-select:none!important;
    user-select:none!important
}

I know I could use Stylus or Greasemonkey to override that rule. It works when I try it in the inspector. But is there a way to get the full date out of "data-tippy-content" and redirect it to the displayed page?