Re: [syndication] Some suggestions for RSS .92

[Jeff Bone <jbone@jump.net>]

Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote:

> As far as I know there is no mention of dates / times that I've come across
> in the spec / working with XSLT.
>
> As I said we 'extend and embrace' RSS internally here with a <time> field
> that has a millisecond value in it, which is easily sortable as an integer
> using pure XSLT.

And this preserves human parseability how, exactly?  I think this is a rotten
idea.  What's the epoch?  (IMO, this has been a bad idea throughout the history
of computing, and only happened as a concession to storage space early on.)

> The only solution I can see (if XSLT is cared enough about) is to use a
> format that sorts itself alphanumerically eg YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm GMT (all
> integers) .

ISO8601 does almost precisely that, with (bonus!) a standard but still sortable
way of expressing local times / timezones.  You get it all:  sortability,
readability, etc., all in one nice little spec.  Not only that, but if you
interpret W3C politics the same way I do, you can at least make yourself believe
it's the preferred mechanism across the whole standards space they cover.

$0.02,

jb