[wp-xmlrpc] WP 2.2.1 breaks Ruby 1.8.2

[Allan Odgaard]

WP 2.2.1 adds a ‘Z’ to the <dateTime.iso8601> dates sent to stress  
that the time is in GMT.

This is not explicitly allowed by the standard [1] and while the date  
remains a valid ISO 8601 date, I do not think that the intent of the  
standard is to allow all valid ISO 8601 dates (see [2] for elaboration).

Ruby 1.8.2, which is what is included with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4.x,  
has an XML-RPC parser which does not expect this ‘Z’ and will in fact  
throw an exception if it encounters one.

So the dilemma is: should WP go beyond the XML-RPC standard and  
explicitly state the time zone, effectively breaking some XML-RPC  
parsers, or should it send a date without time zone info (as done in  
the past).

The XML-RPC standard says the time zone should be documented by the  
server, and to the best of my knowledge, other blogging systems  
(which implement the MetaWeblog API) are treating dates as being in  
GMT (IMO the only thing that makes sense when the producer of the  
date is not running on the same system as the consumer).

So my recommendation would be to revert the change in WP 2.2.1 that  
added the ‘Z’ to dates.

Long-term my recommendation is to revise both the XML-RPC and  
MetaWeblog standards! ;)



[1]: http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec
[2]: http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2007-June/ 
020583.html