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 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