Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Is anyone interested in putting local time in the "Date:" header?
Message-ID: <1989Nov29.015117.11029@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <14749@well.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 89 01:51:17 GMT

In article <14749@well.UUCP> Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us> writes:
>... News articles currently
>put GMT in the "Date:" header.  This may even be required by the news
>RFC, I don't know...

It is not required but is *strongly* recommended.  The problem is that
there are many different ways of expressing what time zone the date was
written in, and some of them are ambiguous.  (For example, BST is both
British Summer Time and Bering Standard Time.)  Life is much, much
simpler if dates are interchanged in a single common representation --
GMT -- and the conversion is done by the news readers when they display
the date.  Then any bizarre eccentricities of a site are confined to
that site.  Believe me, this is the best approach.  The other was tried,
in the beginning, and found to be an endless source of trouble.

The Date header is not broken.  Please do not fix it.
-- 
That's not a joke, that's      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
NASA.  -Nick Szabo             | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
