Japan has a strange tradition of dates and times such as 7-3 2530. Tokyo TV schedules have values like that. "2530" means 0130 on the next day. Businesses that close after midnight may give their closing time as "2600". This comes from a strange combination of military time plus a historical tradition that days start at dawn. At least it's unambiguous.
It's so true though, if trying to scrutinize the history of a repo I find I frequently need to clone it locally just to access the info I need in any kind of decent interface.
Web developers should be using time elements, which include the ISO-8601 datetime.
If web developers do this, there's no reason you couldn't make a simple browser extension that allows you to toggle times from humanized to ISO-8601.
If you wanted, you could make a script to always display the expanded information.
A lot of websites do this, and I think it works out very well. It means you can hover over the time if you want something more precise, but the default level of information shown to you is minimized. This is useful for reducing clutter and information overload.
It really depends on what information you're trying to convey, and where it falls within the hierarchy.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...
I'd say it depends what you're doing. It's easier to compare lengths of time than dates - the difference between "3 days ago" and "5 days ago" is more obvious than the difference between "01/07/2015" and "28/06/2015". That said, if you want to know what happened on a specific date (eg commits that happened on 28/06/2015) then the time passed isn't useful. Ideally you should be able to toggle between the two.
I find this quite annoying when I have to look up something I wrote months ago on HN.
