From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Mon Apr 01 2002 - 13:59:54 CST
On 1 Apr 2002, Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> However, month names may be localized, and then you don't know what
> happens...
Actually, it's easy to know what happens: the articles get discarded as
soon as they hit a site which enforces the rules strictly.
RFC 822/2822 months are specified clearly and unconditionally to use one
and only one set of three-letter abbreviations, those of the Norse/Latin
derived names used in English. It's perfectly acceptable for reading
agents to translate these for viewing by local audiences, but localization
of the on-the-wire format is not permitted. Not for mail, not for news.
> On the other hand, the ISO 8601, with or without the T, is clearly
> unambiguous as long as you use four digits for the year. On top of
> that it is an international standard, and not a local homebrew for
> a certain community.
Uh, RFC 2822 *is* an international standard, not a "local homebrew". It
came out of a different standards process than ISO 8601, but so what?
Note that we're already using RFC 2822 format for the Date header, which
is far more important to a lot of news software than NNTP-Posting-Date.
You're *not* going to be able to change that. So why add yet another
format?
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net