Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

RSS Spec -- Date Associated w/Entry?

Author:Bryant Durrell
Posted:10/31/1999; 11:42:40 AM
Topic:RSS Spec -- Date Associated w/Entry?
Msg #:12560
Prev/Next:12558 / 12561

This may not be the right forum for this, in which case I apologize; ditto if this is an idea that's been considered and discarded already.

That said, I've been tooling up some tools for maintaining a weblog I'm working on, and one of the things I want to do is scroll the weblog based on date... I'd like to dynamically display entries from a given day easily.

But there's no way to associate a date with an entry in the RSS spec. I could maintain a separate database using my own format and generate the RSS file as need be, of course. I could also wedge a field into the RSS file, which has the advantage of not forcing me to maintain two separate files. But would this break various aggregators?

Obviously, people have thought about this and solved the problem. What are other people doing? Has this problem arisen often enough to make it worth baking it into the spec?

If so, I propose using seconds past the epoch as the date format, where the epoch is defined as Jan. 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC. Yeah, I'm being UNIXy here, but defining the format as the number of seconds since a fixed date is much much easier to program around than any Englishesque format and I know about the UNIX epoch. There'd be nothing wrong with using any Windows or Mac equivalent, since one could always code in the necessary offset for tools on another platform... another advantage of using seconds since.

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