Re: Strange pubDates in Dave Wiener's scripting news and others

["philringnalda" <phil@philringnalda.com>]

Hey Andrew,

--- In syndication@y..., Andrew Tumashinov <cdrawn@m...> wrote:
>   there's  something  wrong  with  the  pubdate  in  Dave Winer's
>   Scripting News (http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml).
>     <pubDate>1/1/1904; 12:00:00 AM</pubDate>
>   
>   but the rest of pubdates are something like that:
> 
>   <pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2002 16:15:42 GMT</pubDate>
> 
>   in other words, it's a date in rfc-822

Combination of a bug in his authoring tools (heh), and RSS 
0.91/0.92/0.94/2.0, which use RFC822 (in the case of 2.0 [1], with 
explicit support for four digit years added onto 822).

> 
>   2. Another news feed gives me pubdates as:
> 
>   <pubDate>2002-09-26 19:41:14</pubDate>
> 

That's just wrong. Even if it wasn't missing the T, using a W3C 
datetime in an RSS 0.9x/2.0 element is no more correct than saying 
<pubDate>It was a Thursday, in late September, during the evening as 
I recall</pubDate>. RSS 0.9x/2.0 dates are RFC822+four digit years, 
and the only formally approved date in RSS 1.0, dc:date [2], is a 
W3CDTF, and they aren't interchangable.

(However, as a developer who just wants to keep his users happy, 
since you have to write the code to parse both types of dates, you 
might as well try parsing pubDate as a W3CDTF and dc:date as RFC822+, 
if you don't get a valid date from parsing them as the format they 
should be.)

Phil Ringnalda

[1] http://backend.userland.com/rss
[2] http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/dc/