On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 1:01 PM Drew DeVault <sir at cmpwn.com> wrote:
Timestamps are not human readable
Lots and lots of people around the world are extremely used to dates
written 2020-11-19, notably in China where it is the national standard.
It's very easy for U.S. folks to interpret as a variant of their
11/19/2020, and probably not all that much work for Europeans (yes, the UK
is in Europe, just like Switzerland) with their 19/11/2020 either, as it is
consistently big-endian whereas the native format is consistently
little-endian. A number of countries are switching over, at least for
official purposes.
I think it is very important that timestamps are sent in Universal Time
only. Resolving local times, especially after the fact, is a Very Big Deal
involving a complex C library and timezone data files that change at least
once a year and typically more often.
But I do favor standard punctuation, so I would support the following fixed
format: 2020-11-19T18:12:00Z where Z means Universal Time. 20
characters. Period. If you don't have time information, use 00:00:00Z.
Feed aggregators should probably add the feed name in square brackets after
the date and before the title, so that the user can peruse the "Famous
Foovians" feed while ignoring links to the "Foovian Politicians" gemlog,
say. This would be obtained from the first-level heading in the feed
file. The only reason for standardizing the square brackets is so as not
to have two entries on second-level aggregations.
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.org
Your worships will perhaps be thinking that it is an easy thing
to blow up a dog? [Or] to write a book?
--Don Quixote, Introduction
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20201119/232a
5446/attachment.htm>
---
Previous in thread (21 of 37): 🗣️ Drew DeVault (sir (a) cmpwn.com)
Next in thread (23 of 37): 🗣️ Emilis Dambauskas (emilis (a) runbox.com)