René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"General poor default formatting of datetimes on plot x-axis","articleBody":"### General poor default formatting of datetimes on plot x-axes\r\nI find the default datetime formatting on the basic plot function to be very suboptimal, and often causes overlapping labels.\r\n![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1694067/33856352-e0556c0a-de95-11e7-9ea8-0b2f495293c0.png)\r\n\r\nSome factors that I think are worth addressing:\r\n- \"DD hh:mm\" format is commonly used, and is unfamiliar to most readers.\r\n- Overlapping labels occurs frequently\r\n\r\nIt is obviously possible to improve date formatting through tick formatting, especially the use of major and minor tick formatting and positioning, but I find this very frustrating to do each time, and would appreciate an improved default functionality.\r\n\r\nMy suggestion would be to move the date to the major ticks, and time to minor ticks, with time only specified in the commonly known iso formats: \"hh:mm\" and \"hh:mm:ss\", and date set to the ISO format: \"YYYY-MM-DD\".\r\n\r\nOr a minimal change would be to change the current functionality to default to \"hh:mm\" rather than \"DD hh:mm\"\r\n\r\n\r\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/IanButterworth","@type":"Person","name":"IanButterworth"},"datePublished":"2017-12-11T22:09:48.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":13},"url":"https://github.com/9978/matplotlib/issues/9978"}