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

Re: RSS Issues: Comments requested

Author:Jeremy Bowers
Posted:11/10/1999; 4:03:21 PM
Topic:RSS Issues: Comments requested
Msg #:12970 (In response to 12966)
Prev/Next:12969 / 12971

The only exception -- I'd still really like to see a date format that's easy to manipulate. I don't care what it is, but I think it should be easy to write code that can, say, sort entries by the date element, or decide if a given entry is more than a week old.

I too would like to register a "vote" for spec'ing some sort of date into RSS corresponding to the time that an entry was created. I'm looking at allowing local student groups to run their own RSS files, but odds are I will need to allow people to group them together to provide any real flow (i.e., an all Engineering group). The best way to sort is by date of creation.

Obviously, I can and will just do this myself (although you lose the real creation date when you have to base it on when it first shows up in your scan), but dates being the nasty things they are, I'd like to do it in a "standard" way. There is also the issue, in this case, of time zones... XML-RPC for instance just sort of ducked it, but IMHO RSS will need to address it.

In other words, I'd like to create "SalonHerringWiredFool" type setups, and it would be a lot easier and standard if there was a standardized date field.

Perhaps I'm trying to stretch RSS too far, but adding a date will allow new, more efficient and accurate applications I think.

(Interesting Observation: Doing this sort of thing and then sorting by date presents an interesting skewing technique: If you control the RSS file, dynamically set all your dates in the RSS to the moment the RSS is accessed by some aggregator. Now, if the aggregator is merging and sorting by date, all your stuff appears at the top of the merger. If you like to be even more confident, set your date to 4 years in the future "qbullet.smiley", though that's easier to notice. There could be an honesty issue here...)

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:28 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.