Modern Vespa

Here's a feature that is decidedly experimental, in that I'm not 100% positive I've got it right. I'm not even 75% positive. But let's give it a shot.

I've just pushed a change to the server that will automatically adjust post times (see the image below) for your specific time zone and locale. If your computer is set up reasonably properly (and I suspect that most people running modern computers are in this category) then you shouldn't have to do anything.

In theory, this will adjust for Daylight Savings Time, if it is observed in your locale. Again, it's based on how your computer is set up.

The time zone offset and date / time format fields in your profile are now obsolete, and (if this feature works out) will be removed in the near future. But it's quite possible I've overlooked some detail, or someone will claim that they need their post times to be relative to Botswana time, or something.

In any case, take a look at the post times in an actual topic and see if it seems legit for your location.

If you posted this less than 30 minutes ago it is looking good here in New Zealand.

Looking good UK side 👌

*Holy crap is that the time, gonna be late for work!

24 minutes ago as of this moment.

Showing 7:55pm now. That means my zoom meeting is less than 5 minutes away.

I'll be interested if Oliver checks in -- would like to know if the date shows up in German (assuming his computer is set to German as the system language).

Edit was made only 4 minutes after my post, BST?...

Brave on Win10, looks good. Brave on Android gives 24hour format which is not the default format on my phone. Timezone looks correct

Testing with profile set to GMT.
Yep, works fine.

Works with Firefox on Manjaro Linux.

Works on the other side of the hill in Santa Cruz CA.

Miguel - MacBook Air M1 Safari

I missed the edit time. That's still old-fashioned conversion. Thanks for pointing that out.

That's weird. I was worried about cases like this, as they are out of my control.

Any chance of seeing what another browser looks like on your phone?

The local time was correct on a post I made a few minutes ago. In my case, Win10 and Edge. I do like this upgrade.

It doesn't seem to be obeying my profile preferences, nor my Windows preferences:

Your profile preferences are, at least for the purposes of times shown on posts, completely irrelevant. They will be phased out if I can get this working, and you'll never have to adjust for daylight savings time again.

Your browser is doing all the conversion -- the server does nothing, except to specify what elements are included. For instance, seconds is not included here.

We also get to ask for numeric, short, or long versions of terms, and I've taken a rough guess as to what will fit in the limited space reasonably well: Your browser still decides date order, 12/24 hour time, and language (given that some elements are non-numeric).

The fact that your browser isn't giving you Y-M-D order might be because there are non-numerics requested. Let me experiment with that.

I've double-checked - my browser (Chrome) has been set to ISO 8601 format using https://issuetracker.google.com/settings, as has Windows.

Phasing out the DST stuff is great, applause - but ignoring user preference for date/time format is sad. Not everyone can delve into the internals of their browser to set these things, but having it readily available in the profile is/was helpful.

issuetracker.google.com has its own dedicated settings for how time & date are displayed.

The two are unfortunately tied together. The server does not know what time zone you're actually in. The user preference (which is subject to change twice a year) is the only clue that the server possesses.

The only party that knows the local time with any reasonable certainty is the browser. So this leaves me with two choices:

A) Do all conversions to local time on the server, with an imprecise idea of what local time actually is
B) Do all conversions to local time in the browser, with a browser-dependent interpretation of what the regional time format should look like.

Both approaches are flawed. And there isn't really a happy medium where I can do the time zone offset in the browser but the formatting on the server. It's one or the other.

So, maybe this feature is dead in the water.

On further investigation, it seems it isn't possible to define the DateTime format in Chrome, merely language settings. Another black mark against Chrome.

It does seem a Good Thing to have the DST stuff automagical, so could the choice of whether it is be left up to the user? So the user could choose A or B? I suspect many people don't care about the actual format, but many of us do.

Looking good on my iPad.

It's just a SMOP.

It's a bit complex, and I'm not sure if it really accomplishes any of the goals, which are:
- Simplify profile settings
- Simplify the code
- Eliminate the imprecision of daylight savings time, which users almost never adjust in their profile.

For the record, Safari doesn't seem to obey my system date format settings either.

That's one bright spot, at least.

Nor do Dolphin, Firefox or Edge. They all seem to rely on their own default Language settings, none of which resemble ISO 8601.

For those who have never heard of ISO 8601, it's (AFAIK) the only unambiguous DateTime format, and I've used it seemingly forever, especially useful for computer file naming. Why browsers seem universally to ignore it seems odd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I could venture a guess. Browsers are catering to the masses, not to retired computer programmers. Very few people actually want their date & time to look like this: I often use dates as a prefix to files, but I uniformly use the format:

But is surely quite readable, and unambiguous?

Yes, it's quite readable. But it's also strictly numeric, and of course very few in the US prefer that date order.

I do notice that the current date format displayed on my posts is exactly the same as the current format displayed on Jess' posts and on JimC's. And it doesn't seem difficult to read or decipher, i.e. - Thu, Dec 1, 2022, 12:55 PM

You're talking about the screenshots here, right?

It is what appears on my display while running Win10 and Edge - so, yes.

I guess I'll just have to put Google to display UK English - at least then the time makes sense, and the date is OK.

It looks like the javascript function I am using (toLocaleString) is both misnamed and its abilities somewhat overstated.

According to this discussion on stack overflow, the browser implementation will use a "regionally appropriate" format. In most cases, it will not use the host system's format preferences.

With that in mind, I'm going to try a few things to see if I can salvage something out of this. It is unlikely to be perfect, though.

Looking at that historically is it December 01, 2022 or January 12, 2022? That's why I sign paperwork with written month. Depending on country your living in date formats aren't the same. It was an issue when I lived overseas.

although mm/dd/yyyy vs dd/mm/yyyy is common confusion as americans enjoy being different to the rest of the world, I'm pretty sure no one uses yyyy-dd-mm. but I also like to write 3 letter abbreviation for the month

Please explain historically?

Using words for dates is no use for those who don't read that language.

Fortunately, in this specific circumstance, that's something I can fix. The toLocaleString function in javascript will localize the days of the week and the months (including abbreviations).

Is "12-1" December 1 or January 12th?

That depends on what you and the recipient have agreed. But 2022-12-01 is the ISO standard for the 1st of December 2022, and needs no other party's agreement.