Re: [syndication] Some suggestions for RSS .92

[Jeff Bone <jbone@jump.net>]

Lurker weighing in here...

I agree with Dan that ISO8601 is the preferred format for dates, but Mike
brings up a good point re: XSLT.  A quick grep of the XSLT 1.0 spec seems to
reveal that it doesn't speak to datetime value transformations at all;
without knowing more about XSLT myself, it's difficult to say whether or not
this poses a problem in using XSLT to process other XML documents that use
ISO8601.  It's possible that XSLT "inherits" something in the way of managing
datetimes from some other W3C recommendation that I'm not aware of, but
without a more comprehensive read of the XSLT recommendation (and it's been
months since I looked at it before tonight) it's hard to say.  Note however
that W3C has a separate NOTE [1] out discussing ISO8601.  Standard W3C
disclaimer notwithstanding, the issue of whether this should be interpreted
as any sort of endorsement is an open question. [2]  Note that this whole
area is (was?) controversial enough that at some point there was a W3C-hosted
mailing list about the discussion. [3]

Mike, since you raised the question:  what's the answer?

:-)

jb

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
[2] http://www.w3.org/Submission/1997/14/Comment.html
[3] mailto:datetime-comments@w3.org