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Re: a methodical approach to defining what date elements we need


Dare Obasanjo wrote:

--- Sam Ruby <rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So, if you will bear with me, let's take a look at the
following together:

http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml?mode=full


http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=139&topic=17

http://www.movabletype.org/features.shtml
http://journurl.com/?entry=1007&template=upgrade

In the latter two look for text like and "Movable
Type allows you to set a post's date stamp to any date or time you wish,
for pre-dating or post-dating information when it goes live.", and
"Pre- and post-date entries"

If we deny this information a home, it will simply
find one of its own accord.

I would categorize the features described at those
links differently from how you described the date
field. It seems MovableType and other tools allow you
to control something that maps to the 'issued' date of
the entry.

I sincerely doubt that any of these tool vendors would
want to make the distinction between issued and the
user entered date. I might be wrong so I'd love to get
their opinions. If I go with your descriptions, then
Atom needs 3 dates (last modified, created & bogus
user entered date). As an aggregator author I'd always
ignore the last one.

What I described above is basically what I originally meant by the term issued. People like Asbjørn and Graham have made separate but rather compelling cases that the term issued is probably not the most appropriate term to be used here. I'm no longer attached to that term.

As to the label 'bogus', this clearly is something a number of major weblogging software vendors have chosen not only to implement, but to actively highlight in their features list. Roger wants to sort on this field, Graham wants to reformat it (presumably for localization or usability purposes).

I am quite OK with RSSBandit swimming upstream on this issue. Even if the only benefit of keeping this field separate is that there is a significantly reduced temptation for tool vendors to 'pollute' the set of date fields that RSSBandit actively cares about with information that the user carefully and deliberately chose to provide, then clearly this should be of significant value.

- Sam Ruby