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openstreetmap / openstreetmap-website

The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Notes RSS feed should not include relative time #798

Open scy opened 9 years ago

scy commented 9 years ago

The Notes RSS feed is a great feature, thanks! However, when displaying the creation time of a note, it’s using a relative date (as in “created 3 hours ago”). This isn’t the brightest idea, for two reasons:

First, feeds are asynchronous things. Between the time I fetch the feed and the time I actually read it might be several hours, if not days. However, it will still say “created 3 hours ago”, which is misleading and pretty much useless.

Second, there are some feed readers that highlight differences in feed items between consecutive fetch processes (think “what has been changed in this news article since it has been published”), and relative dates cause unnecessary noise in these readers. (See this example image from a feature request for NewsBlur I just opened.)

If possible, please replace the relative date with an absolute one, like “created on 2014-08-02 16:29:42 GMT”, or remove the date altogether.

tomhughes commented 9 years ago

It already has the absolute date doesn't it? as the standard pubDate element. It may have a relative date as well, in the text, but the actual structured data should have proper dates.

danstowell commented 9 years ago

You're right that it does have standard pubDate, and it also has the absolute date as a tooltip for the relative date in the blurb. Example feed. But IMHO @scy is right - RSS is designed to be read "later", and usually used that way, which makes phrases like "3 hours ago" kinda unhelpful.

tomhughes commented 9 years ago

It's almost certainly including the same fragment for the text that is used for the web site, so it's going to be hard to do much about it though.