adrian holovaty

December 20, 2002, 3:33 AM ET

Using 'smart' dates, today

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has posted some outstanding ideas on intelligent relative dates. Good stuff:

What if Web sites automatically made dates relative to the current date rather than the publication date? For example, suppose I refer to "Dec. 20, 2002" -- which right now for me is "tomorrow" -- using some JavaScript that will display whatever "Dec. 20" means to you, at the time you access this page.

He offers a JavaScript solution that displays dates in an intelligent, relative manner, according to the user's computer's system clock -- much like Peter Paul Koch's "document last modified" script (and somewhat similar, conceptually, to this site's smart anchoring). Wisely, Nathan points out several problems with this method -- namely the need for editors to tag dates in a special way and the reliance on the user's computer (a problem also apparent in chicagotribune.com's strike countdown a few months ago).

My take: How 'bout continuing to use relative dates ("today" or "tomorrow") in news stories but wrapping them in <abbr> tags that have a title attribute which contains the full date? That way, some of the technical problems Nathan pointed out can be avoided. It'd look something like this:

The code: <abbr title="December 20, 2002">today</abbr>

How it looks: today

This could be a more realistic short-term solution -- although I certainly believe manufacturers of content-management systems should incorporate the feature Nathan has proposed. (On the server side.)

(For more on abbreviations, see my recent entry on that topic. It was posted Tuesday.)