[uf-discuss] dates and hatom

[David Janes]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 7:34 AM, James Tindall <james at atomless.com> wrote:
> 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/

Just to make this perfectly clear, this isn't a specific hAtom
problem/issue. hAtom piggybacks on the datetime design pattern [1]
where a solution, if needed, should be found. Within that, datetimes
are formatted using the ISO8601 standard [2] and there's lots o' linky
goodness on that page.

Regards, etc...

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/iso-8601

-- 
David Janes
Mercenary Programmer
http://code.davidjanes.com