[wp-hackers] Timezone in RSS feeds

[David Chait]

As the author of yet-another feed parser library (CG-FeedRead), I 
generally have to agree with Geoffrey here.  The timestamps should be 
the same timestamps published on the blog itself, the data for those 
timestamps is in the db, shown to readers on the web, thus there's no 
"bother".  Converting from 'native TZ' to GMT is actually losing a bit 
of information (that arguably could be served up elsewhere in the feed, 
say the TZ of the blog as an element... but I digress... ;) ).  The data 
should be consistent whether it's on the web or via RSS or other format, 
as it is the same post/article/data in every case.  I'd say that while 
it's a seemingly less-important detail to 'retain' that extra piece of 
data, I see no reason why WP can't output it as normal.  All IMHO! ;) ;)

-d

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
> On 10 Apr 2007, at 17:08, Computer Guru wrote:
>> 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