BuddyPress.org

The way ‘time ago’ information is output and displayed is beginning to annoy me:

• It’s too verbose from end user perspective – Do I really need to know it happened 2 hours, 5 minutes ago?
• HTML markup is inconsistent/crufty from CSS styling perspective
• It’s a PITA to work with from microformats/js/etc perspective

Examples of HTML inconsistency…

Activity feed:

<span class="time-since">2 hours, 5 minutes ago</span>

Members widget:

<span class="activity">registered 5 days, 14 hours ago</span>

So, I have a suggestion which deals with all these issues and adds extra awesomeness. 🙂

Go look here: http://timeago.yarp.com/

The HTML output for any ‘time ago’ display would be made consistent:

<time class="ago" datetime="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">%fallback_text%</time>

CSS will look nice: time.ago { whatever }

jQuery will look nice: $(‘time.ago’).whatever();

%fallback_text% would be there in case js is disabled in browser, ensuring the user would still see something meaningful. You could have this as just the actual time/date and thus ditch all the server-side processing that’s currently used to determine the ‘time ago’.

IMHO this approach should be applied to anything that displays ‘time ago’ text in WP – consistent, concise, easy to style, less code server-side.