Countdown.js - A JavaScript API For Accurate, Intuitive Description Of The Timespan Between Two Dates

Countdown.js is a  simple JavaScript API for producing an accurate, intuitive description of the timespan between two Date instances. 

While seemingly a trivial problem, the human descriptions for a span of time tend to be fuzzier than a computer naturally computes. More specifically, months are an inherently messed up unit of time. For instance, when a human says "in 1 month" how long do they mean? Banks often interpret this as thirty days but that is only correct one third of the time. People casually talk about a month being four weeks long but there is only one month in a year which is four weeks long and it is only that long three quarters of the time. Even intuitively defining these terms can be problematic. For instance, what is the date one month after January 31st, 2001? JavaScript will happily call this March 3rd, 2001. Humans will typically debate either February 28th, 2001 or March 1st, 2001. There isn't a "right" answer, per se.

Countdown.js emphasizes producing intuitively correct description of timespans which are consistent as time goes on. To do this, Countdown.js uses the concept of "today's date next month" to mean "a month from now". As the days go by, Countdown.js produces consecutively increasing or decreasing counts without inconsistent jumps. The range of accuracy is only limited by the underlying system clock.

Countdown.js approaches finding the difference between two times like an elementary school subtraction problem. Each unit acts like a base-10 place where any overflow is carried to the next highest unit, and any underflow is borrowed from the next highest unit. In base-10 subtraction, every column is worth 10 times the previous column. It is a little more complex since the conversions between the units of time are not the same and months are an inconsistent number of days. In the final step of the algorithm, Countdown.js prunes the set of time units down to only those requested, forcing larger units down to smaller.

Requirements: None
Demo: http://countdownjs.org/demo.html
License: MIT License

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