RSS Schema and dates
Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Sam mentions dc:date; that’s what I was thinking, except that ‘date’ on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics.
dcterms:issued seems to match RSS’s pubDate most closely, while as far as I can tell, dcterms:modified matches lastBuildDate.
The question I have is of precedence; aggregators that support both will need to defer to one or the other. I’d think that the W3C-formatted form would be preferable, because it’s easier to parse (so simple, I’ve written one), and less likely to be misunderstood (e.g., “Thursday” instead of “Thu”, variable length fields, etc.).
One way to go about it in the schema would be to say that if pubDate is present, dcterms:issued must be present; that way, it’s backwards-compatible with things expecting pubDate.
What do people think? Is date parsing enough of a problem (both from a getting-it-right standpoint and a oh-what-a-pain-to-implement standpoint) to encourage a shift towards the W3C datetime format?
3 Comments
Sam Ruby said:
Tuesday, April 29 2003 at 4:32 AM
Phil Ringnalda said:
Tuesday, April 29 2003 at 5:38 AM
Mark Nottingham said:
Tuesday, April 29 2003 at 9:09 AM