David
I'm not a fan of "3 days ago", "a month ago", i.e.  *relative* date/time information of the kind provided in the "meta" for posts in Q&A and chat (where there's also "an hour later", "7 days later", and so on). At least in chat there is a hover for precise date-time info, but not (yet) Q&A posts.

Ideally, it would be great to have a tool-tip with human-readable date/time for those "relative" time-stamps. Hopefully this is a fairly trivial thing to add, and at least then if one did want (or, for some odd reason, need) to know the precise time of posting, that would be readily available.

---

P.s. I see in viewing the page source that the current date/time information has the format `data-seconds="4836210.182808"`. I'm not familiar with that format, and after searching the TA code I'm none the wiser. I see it is associated with `epoch`, but it doesn't seem to correlate to PHP's UNIX "epoch". So, as a bonus, if someone could kindly explain what that "data-seconds" number represents, I will have learned something. :)
Top Answer
Jack Douglas
We've added the precise timestamp on hover.

> Ideally, it would be great to have a tool-tip with human-readable date/time for those "relative" time-stamps.

The hover text is formatted the same way the chat timestamps display on hover, so just the time if today, and the full timestamp is reserved for older posts.

> So, as a bonus, if someone could kindly explain what that "data-seconds" number represents, I will have learned something.

It's the 'age' of the timestamp — the number of seconds between the timestamp and right now. It doesn't need 6 decimal places of precision, that's just wasted bandwidth! The reference to `epoch` in the code is a bit misleading as it is being applied to an `interval` rather than a `timestamp`, so in that context it just means the size of the interval in seconds rather than the unix epoch.

Enter question or answer id or url (and optionally further answer ids/urls from the same question) from

Separate each id/url with a space. No need to list your own answers; they will be imported automatically.