From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 16:13:12 CDT
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
> 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.
Yes, if the localized version does not coincide with any of the strings
used by the standard. (No, I don't know of such a case where the strings
coincide, but refer to different months.)
Then again, I was talking about date interpretation in general, in
response to Bruce Lilly's claim that numeric dates are ambiguous.
> 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.
That doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. As a matter of fact,
I seem to recall having seen it from time to time in e-mail.
> 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?
Yeah, it is international, but it is still local to the corner of
the world known as Internet. Dates are used a little more widely than
that,
Then again, it has to be admitted that ISO8601 is not very widely used.
Sweden, Hungary and China are the countries I know where the notation
is used in some form.
> 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?
I wasn't really suggesting that ISO8601 should be used for the case at
hand, but noted that the existence of the format defined by RFC2822 and
already in use in other places in Netnews is very compelling argument
for which choice to make.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se