Misleading date range labels? (Before, After, Between)

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The first 7 posts were split from a FamilyTreeView thread to this new topic to discuss potentially misleading labels of the “Before”, “After” and “Between” date modifiers:

In the latest version of FamilyTreeView (v0.1.109), I added a feature that has been requested several times (here and here by @Urchello): a way to display dates compactly. The two images below show dates and their compact representation. Please keep in mind that the representation is just a first attempt/draft.

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[Unrelated parts of the original post have been removed.]

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Instead of < and > , how about “≤” &le; and “≥” &ge; ?

And use ↔ &harr; for ranges and spans?

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You are correct. I just checked the date GEDCOM specification and “AFT” (“After” in Gramps) doesn’t mean “after specified date” but “no earlier than x”, i.e. “specified date or after specified date”. So ≥ is correct and > is not.

I have to admit that from my point of view this is a big issue in the Gramps UI. Although GEDCOM’s “AFT” suggests the meaning “after”, using that word for the label in the UI (because it is similar to the three letter code used in the GEDCOM file format) over a label that actually matches the correct meaning, is a big issue that should be fixed in a Gramps update. The same significant problem exists for “before” and “between … and …”, but not for “from” (= “beginning on x”) and “to” (= “ending on x”).
I think I (and probably many others) have entered dozens (maybe hundreds) of after/before/between dates incorrectly because of this mislabeling!

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well, it is more than that.

I originally believed that the new “To 15 Mar 2025” and “From” were open-ended: “-∞ to (and include) 15 Mar 2025” and “from (and include) 15 Mar 2025 to ∞”. But they (like “Before” and “After”) are limited and use the Limits preferences.

@Nick-Hall says “To” and “From” use identical logic to the “Before” and “After”

I do not see the point of adding another 2 types that are aliases for 2 existing limited span types. Adding complications only made sense when adding open-ended spans that did NOT have limits.

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While I agree that to and from should describe the time to negative/positive infinity. It definitely makes sense to have a distinction between them and “before”/“after”/“between”. “before”/“after”/“between” describe ranges (some day before/after/between the given date(s)), while “from”/“to”/“from … to …” describe a span (all days before/after/between the given date(s)), so they definitely have their right to exist.

I think it would make sense to change “after x” to “x or later” and “before x” to “x or earlier” (or something similar). A similar change needs to be made for “between”, but I think there is no better wording than adding “, including/inclusive” to the current “between x and y”.

Do you know any related discussion here in the forum or in the bug tracker about this misleading labeling?

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I agree mathematical accuracy is important.

The thread noted in my previous has the only discussion of which I am aware. And it has links to the GitHub PR and related Wiki section.

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Since the discussion you mentioned above is about “from” and “to”, not the misleading “after”/“before”/“between”:
Do you think it would make sense to move this discussion to a new thread/topic? That way other users might be able to find this discussion more easily and we might get more opinions on this topic.

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Moved. (Now for something completely different … to meet the 20 character requirement.)

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Now that this separate discussion has been untangled, I would love to get some feedback from others on the (in my opinion) misleading labels.

Since he discussed the “To” and “From” with @emyoulation before:
Perhaps @Nick-Hall would like to comment on this topic?

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