1945 was 80 years ago

A wonderfully helpful little design detail

location Raleigh,  NC,  US

I've been reading Maggie Appleton's essays & writings for a while now. The time, attention, and care given to her garden is an inspiration and aspiration.

While reading A Short History of Bi-Directional LinksI came across a nifty feature that I've never seen before...but love it.

A screenshot from Maggie Appleton's essay, of a second-level header and single sentence that read, "Bi-directional links are not new" and "The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 1945 (80ya) when Vannevar Bush dreamed up the Memex machine.
A zoomed in screenshot of text highlighted and showing a title tooltip on hover. The highlighted text comprise of old-style numerators—1945—and a colored, styled subscript—80ya—with a system tooltip that reads, "1945 was 80 years ago".

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The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 194580ya when [...]

It's a wonderfully helpful feature.

Mental math's hard for me, especially when it comes to years. Outside of that basic accessibility, it contextualizes in a more human-relative time how far ago 1945 was.

Now, I'm going to keep a lookout for this across more reads.

Feels like a fun session on trying to build a similar feature for my own garden.