[wp-hackers] Timezone in RSS feeds

[Computer Guru]

OK, then you should understand fully why it doesn't matter to the end user
what timezone it was published in.

I'm in +2 GMT. I don't give a damn whether Scoble was having lunch or dinner
when he made his last post - All I care is when it was published. 

UTC is the universal base standard for times. Hence, it's only natural that
it *and only it* should be in the feed.

I don't what a user would benefit in knowing what the local time was for the
person doing the publishing. RSS feeds are served to the user, everything
tailored to fit... So why not the timezone too?

Why break standards and conventions for something as pointless as local TZ
data?

Computer Guru
NeoSmart Technologies
http://neosmart.net/blog/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-
> bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Geoffrey Sneddon
> Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 11:26 PM
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Timezone in RSS feeds
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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