[wp-hackers] Timezone in RSS feeds

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 10 Apr 2007, at 17:08, Computer Guru wrote:

> You're not understanding my point.

I understand it well.

>
> RSS feeds are supposed to be machine-readable universable syndication
> formats.

I know – I'm the author of a feed parser library (SimplePie) with  
thousands of users.

> When dealing with standards and humans don't have to read what's  
> there, you
> serve as little info as possible that can be translated to give the  
> complete
> picture, and wherever you can, you stick to the "base" formats.

The complete picture would be telling the user what timezone the item  
was published in.

>
> Your blog serves UTC time == it doesn't have to serve the current  
> time + the
> UTC offset.
>
> So long as the feed readers are doing the conversion, why should  
> your blog
> have to bother with UTC offsets, DST, multiple TZs, user-specific  
> TZ, etc.

It gives further information that the user may want. It doesn't cost  
WP anything to give the extra information (±[0-9]{4} is a single  
character longer than \x20GMT).


- Geoffrey Sneddon