Idea UI: differentiate between dead person (unknown date) and alive person

I find it quite jarring that, when looking at dates, it is impossible to know if a person is dead or alive. The reason for this is that there is no visual feedback when it comes to differentiating a dead person (unknown date) and an alive one.

My proposal is to check if there is a Death event and, in that case, add a question mark, as shown below

... good idea!

And maybe use "1875-???" if there is no DEAT event, but the person should be dead because she was born long ago.

So it doesn't look lopsided, I would also extend this "???" (or similar convention) to individuals without a birth date.

In many cases, especially for immigrants, their death records/dates are available, but only an estimate (if that) for a birth.

Also, is there a means of differentiating and showing the uncertainty when these dates are "ABT" or "BET"? I can estimate births based on census ages, etc., and deaths based on whether they were listed as surviving in someone else's obituary, or when their surviving spouse becomes a widow in a census. Right now, for a BET date, webtrees displays the end of that range. Maybe add a "~" before the date, or italics (where possible)?

I definitely agree re birth dates. While my use case is specifically about death, the overarching issue here is that the date representation doesn't convey enough information to the reader.

It would be great to do something like

1936 -> certain year
~1936 -> cover all cases where the date is there but an approximation (EST, BET, etc)
? -> event is there but no date specified
X -> event is not there but should be dead (I am not a massive fan of this case. I think it could stay empty and people might just realize the mistake. I am worried it could encompass some false negatives)

Would love to contribute myself to achieve this, does anyone have pointers on the potentially interested files?

Why create something new, specific to webtrees, no o other app does support that can't be translated into gedcom.
The data level, that webtrees does supprt is gedcom. If a date can not be expressed in gedcom, we should not use it.

Franz Frese wrote:

Why create something new, specific to webtrees, no o other app does support that can't be translated into gedcom.
The data level, that webtrees does supprt is gedcom. If a date can not be expressed in gedcom, we should not use it.

For usability? Like, same reason why there is a dash between birth and death year? It has nothing to do with gedcom or other standards, it's an indicator, it's about the ux.
The suggestion here is not to inject new characters in the record themselves, it's just to render those characters in the webpage, so that the user can understand the data better.

So do it.
Make the ui better is always a good thing.

AlexKalopsia wrote:

Would love to contribute myself to achieve this, does anyone have pointers on the potentially interested files?

That is literally what I said above

Franz Frese wrote:

Why create something new, specific to webtrees, no o other app does support that can't be translated into gedcom.
The data level, that webtrees does supprt is gedcom. If a date can not be expressed in gedcom, we should not use it.

I am also in favor of improving the display in the UI in this case. No data is changed here and the improvement is not GEDCOM relevant. It would be nice if this would be implemented in the standard.

AlexKalopsia wrote:

Would love to contribute myself to achieve this, does anyone have pointers on the potentially interested files?

As far as I can see, you can find the code in the following methods:

• function lifespan in app/Individual.php
• function display in app/Date.php

Depending on the different views and diagrams, one of the above methods is used.

Awesome, thank you, will start looking into this

I like the idea of indicating death in the "lifespan" display.

But I do not really like the use of a question-mark to indicate it.

"1843–?" looks like the birth-date is questionable.

There is also the issue of internationalisation. Not all languages use question marks, and some use them differently - e.g. Spanish - ¿question?

Elsewhere, we use an elipsis "…" to indicate unknown or missing data.

Might this be a better option: "1843–…"

fisharebest wrote:

Might this be a better option: "1843–…"

That's fine with me.

I like the suggestion a lot, I agree it might be a better solution, thanks.

I have a follow-up question, though I guess it can be discussed in the PR:

To me it feels like whatever language we adopt, it should extend to missing birth as well, so that we and up with a format like

"1778–…" (missing death date)
"...–1810" missing birth date)
"...–..." (missing birth and death date)
"1989–" (no death)

The alternative is only doing it for death, resulting in

"1778–…" (missing death date)
"–1810" missing birth date)
"–..." (missing birth and death date)
"1989–" (no death)

Any feedback on this? To me using ... also on missing birth date (example 1) will just increase consistency in the format and read very clearly. Thoughts?

There is an established convention to mark birth as an asterisk / star and death with a dagger / obelisk: '†'
See unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m02/0441.html

Examples:

• known birth, known death: *1778 - †1810
• known birth, unknown death: *1778 - †
• known birth, still alive: *1987
• unknown birth, known death: †1810
• unknown birth, known not alive: †
• unknown birth, still alive:

No ellipsys for brevity. When something is not known, then don't show.

I've seen star marking birth and cross marking death in plenty of old church records. However, I'm sure these abbreviations are specifically Christian: the star marking the birth of Christ, the cross from his crucifixion and later used to mark burials.

Since webtrees is used across so many cultures and languages, I wonder if those symbols would make any sense to non-Christians. For example, didn't the ancient Greeks use alpha and omega to mark the beginning and end?

Personally, I think the elispsis is a better option.

It's a bit pointless discussing now. Greg has already made a couple of commits for birth & death

I would appreciate to have more info on this, since - as I already mentioned above - I already I spent some time on my fork to address this, in order to contribute myself to the project.

I am excited to contribute but would also like not to waste my time

> However, I'm sure these abbreviations are specifically Christian:

They are, and this is why they were removed from a very early version of webtrees.

> No ellipsys for brevity. When something is not known, then don't show.

In the lifespan display, you can hover your mouse over the birth/death year to see the exact date and the place.

I guess that here, it is known that a death occured - but not the actual date.

Now that we have the elipsis, we also have something for the mouse to hover over, allowing you to see a place of death, even if the date is unknown.

> I dunno who Greg is

Greg is me, aka "fisharebest" - the author/owner/maintainer of webtrees