Re: comments on Atom 0.2

[Nelson Minar <nelson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for all the replies - I'm going to combine my answers here.

>Nelson, one of us is getting the datetime's wrong. I'm not saying who though
>:-) I'm not sure.
>2003-08-07T09:36-07:00
>2003-07-15T15:59:60-08:03
>                ^^^^^^^

I think these are both valid times - your's has seconds, mine doesn't.
I believe the Atom timestamps are relative to the W3C subset of
ISO8601, http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-datetime-19980827
There are a variety of forms there that are valid.


>If I post in PST but don't tag it with <issued>, then the only date the
>blog tool has is the modified date, which is in UTC.  How would it know
>the proper timezone to translate that date into when showing the date
>you posted with?

I hadn't thought about that. So we'd like to know two different
things: the absolute time that the entry was created, and the local
time (to convey things like "this is a 3am rambling").

I still think <issued> should be optional; I don't think most blogs
will usefully distinguish between the two, so it shouldn't be
required. I also wonder if maybe best practice is not to make
<modified> be *local time* with a timezone offset rather than UTC.
That way you get both absolute time and the local time in one little
timestamp. That may pose a problem for sites like Blogger and
LiveJournal, though, do they know what timezone their user is in?

Besides timezone, the other question in <issued> vs <modified> is
whether issued is the creation time of the post and modified is the
last modified time. Is that the intent? I could see that being useful
in some cases, but still I think <issued> should be optional.


>>I think <summary> and similar elements should have the same content
>>encoding attribute that <content> does.
>And if <content> is multipart how should the aggregator resolve the type 
>of  encoding?

Uh, I dunno. Multipart is complicated. I just want something really
simple; I want to make a word in my summary bold, or include an
element like &eAcute; without resorting to character encoding.
(Honestly, the real reason is I'm lazy. In Blosxom the summary (title)
is also HTML and converting it to text is awkward, particularly when
you have entities embedded.)



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