Wanted: Date field in RSS Item

[alex@jguru.com]

I'm immersing myself in RSS, trying to integrate it into my company's 
newly-launched site, http://www.jguru.com/. I'm really excited about 
the whole thing, and you folks have done a heck of a good job building
the format and tools.

My big pet peeve at the moment is the fact that RSS doesn't have a
per-*item* date field, so I can see when each item was
added/published, independent of when the channel was published.
That way I could, for instance, merge several
channels and sort by most-recent-item (no matter which channel it came from).
Or I could have a channel containing stories from the past week, and 
actually see which day/time each was published. As it is, all I can
really tell is when the channel was last published, and often I have to
fudge that (by recording the date I downloaded it last). 

Seems like a huge oversight. Do you agree? How would one go about
getting it added to the spec? (Call it "date" or "pubDate" or whatever...)

Cheers -

 - Alex

P.S. Is anyone reading this list? Seems pretty dead lately...

---
Alex Chaffee                       mailto:alex@jguru.com
jGuru Java Training                http://www.jguru.com/
Curator of Stinky Art Collective   http://www.stinky.com/
Creator of Gamelan                 http://www.gamelan.com/
Founder of Purple Technology       http://www.purpletech.com/