[uf-discuss] dates and hatom

[James Tindall]

I've been playing with the friendfeed api in order to output hatom 
formated content.

Is there any kind of consensus on the best solution from all those that 
have been proposed for the date-time problem.

At the moment I think I favour the 'machine data in class' solution 
proposed by the bbc : 
http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern#Machine-data_in_class
However, I'm not unsure how to handle time zones that are ahead of GMT 
and so require a suffix of '+hhmm' as '+' is not a valid character for a 
class name. I couldn't find mention of this on the wiki page.

Also, the wiki examples initially specify using a date in ISO 8601 
format but then in the 'machine data in class' examples it has changed 
from 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS-ZZ:ZZ' to 'YYYYMMDDTHH:MM:SS-ZZ:ZZ'  -  is 
there a reason for this and is it still considered to be ISO 8601 
without the hyphens? And how about just using the time zone abbreviation 
in place of the time zone offset would that work with the parsers that 
have already added support for this?

During testing the parsers listed here:
http://microformats.tumblr.com/post/64799295/extracting-meaningful-content-from-hatom-formatted
* All but one fails to extract the published/updated dates.
* Only one or two successfully extract any images.
* None of them extract any comments. I know there's no comment support 
yet under hatom but wondered whether any of the parsers support comment 
extraction at all?

Any tips/suggestions on what needs to change in my markup in order to 
improve extraction (or for any other reasons :) would be much appreciated.
The site I'm currently trying this out on is : 
http://noise.jamestindall.info/

cheers,

James