Summary
When displaying the date and/or time, we follow the standards of the CLDR. (CLDR - Unicode Common Locale Data Repository)
- 4 styles. For both date and time, there are four different styles with different levels of detail.
- Styles. Don't mix styles in time + date combinations.
- Tooltip. Each time (whether absolute or relative) comes with a title attribute. This always contains the style full, so that the user sees the weekday and time zone.
Related pages
Date and time format
Localized date, time and date-time formatting is not trivial. Depending on the country or language, there are different formats, habits or exceptions. Therefore, in wescale we follow the standard of CLDR for numerical and for linguistic notations. Basically, we distinguish four different styles (short, medium, long, full), each differing in its level of detail resp. length.
| Style | Date | Time | Date & Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| short | 3/19/21 | 8:23 AM | 3/19/21, 8:23 AM |
| medium | Mar 19, 2021 | 8:23:27 AM | Mar 19, 2021, 8:23:27 AM |
| long | March 19, 2021 | 8:23:27 AM GMT | March 19, 2021 at 8:23:27 AM GMT |
| full | Friday, March 19, 2021 | 8:23:27 AM GMT | Friday, March 19, 2021 at 8:23:27 AM GMT |
Relative time format
In addition to the absolute time, the relative time may also be of interest to the user in some cases. The timestamp can be in the past as well as in the future. Two years ago, last month, 3 minutes ago, tomorrow, in two weeks, ... - to name just a few of the possible values. These are also dependent on the user's language. Country specific words as well as pluralization of words is set automagically by the CLDR standards, so you don't have to worry about i18n and t10n here.
WUI pattern
Description
2 days ago
Mar 19, 2021, 8:23:27 AM
Date & Time in combination with relative time
We use this format very often in tables for the create or last updated date. It is always set up in the same way. The relative time, then a line break, then the date and time combination in style medium. Overall, there is a tooltip with the absolute time and date in full style.
hh:mm:ss.ms
08:50:21 .644
Time and milliseconds
The specification of milliseconds is in most cases completely irrelevant for the user. However, for technical dependencies, milliseconds can be decisive. In the support logs, for example, the time is therefore given in seconds and milliseconds.
Mar 19, 2021-Apr 19, 2021
Time range
With many time ranges, it is enough if they are accurate to the day. Here we use the date style medium without specifying a time. For the display of time ranges in tables, we use a separate column for the start and for the end value, so that sorting by both values is meaningful to the users.
7:16:25 PM Australian Eastern Daylight Time
Time zone
The time zone of a user is automatically set based on the respective user parameters. All times that a user sees within wescale are translated to his respective local time. So if a colleague from Australia creates an item after his morning tea at 09:45 AM, the user in New York will see the same item with a creation time of 6:45 PM of the previous day.
For the page layout, it should always be taken into account that the display of timezones may be quite long
More information about using and working with time zones can be found at www.w3.org/TR/timezone/