[wp-xmlrpc] WP 2.2.1 breaks Ruby 1.8.2

[Joe Cheng]

> Why can't we use the dateTime data type?  I've read over the XML-RPC
> spec at http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec which I read to indicate that the
> dateTime format is to follow the ISO 8601 format.

Because several popular XML-RPC parsing libraries will choke on the Z--
exactly the problem that started this thread, IIRC. Windows Live Writer
originally formatted the dates with Z but we had to back away after
one blog service after another choked on the dates. Anything written in
.NET (they all use Cook Computing's XMLRPC.NET library) and a bunch of
servers written in PHP would throw errors when encountering the Z.

Don't bother looking for justification in the XML-RPC spec. It's useless.
Note that it doesn't say to follow the ISO 8601 format. It just happens
That the name of the tag is "dateTime.iso8601"--that's it. Now, it's
understandable that you would interpret that to mean "any ISO 8601
conformant value is allowed", but it's also understandable that many
XML-RPC library authors looked at the example and decided that the
only format that is valid is yyyyMMddTHH:mm:ss, full stop.

(Incidentally, we should be glad we don't have to parse ISO 8601--it's
an unbelievably complex standard that lets you express dates in a
bewildering array of different formats (including, for example, year
and number of days into the year). Far, far too general for a simple
machine-to-machine protocol like XML-RPC.)

> That was my logic at any rate, I'm happy to hear thoughts from others
> on this.

Honestly, forget logic. XML-RPC and MetaWeblog are so vague/ambiguous,
it's useless to argue about what the spec meant or intended. The only
thing worth grabbing onto is what the de facto interpretation is.
That's why I think it's important for us to document those de facto
interpretations, and where there is none or where the status quo is
Fundamentally flawed (as in time zone support), try and fix it.