RE: [syndication] Some suggestions for RSS .92

["Mike Cannon-Brookes" <mike@bookmarkbox.com>]

> 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.)

Oh I wasn't saying this is a good idea ;) Just that it's easy to do and as
our files are all machine written / read, it works for us.

> > 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.

That sounds perfect then, problems solved. Yes?

Mike