Patch for Jon

Jon Udell is Experimenting with RSS 2.0.  I really like his new feed, though I think that the <docs> and <dc:date> elements need to be updated.  The Dublin Core defines dates as a profile of ISO 8601.  There probably are better fixes than what I am about to suggest, but here is a relatively brute force means (most of the logic deals with formatting the time zone and padding):

date.get (adrpost^.when, @day, @month, @year, @hour, @minute, @second);

tz = date.getCurrentTimeZone() / 60;
if (tz < 0) {tzsign = '-'} else {tzsign = '+'};
tz = abs(tz);
tzh = tz / 60;
tzm = tz - tzh*60;

month = string.mid("0" + month, string.length(month), 2);
day = string.mid("0" + day, string.length(day), 2);
hour = string.mid("0" + hour, string.length(hour), 2);
minute = string.mid("0" + minute, string.length(minute), 2);
second = string.mid("0" + second, string.length(second), 2);
tzh = string.mid("0" + tzh, string.length(tzh), 2);
tzm = string.mid("0" + tzm, string.length(tzm), 2);

dcdate = year + "/" +month + "/" + day + "T" + hour + ":" + minute + ":" + second + tzsign + tzh + ":" + tzm;


Jon also needs to use CDATA in his content:encoded tagsets and not entity encoded HTML. (Bill Kearney explains why in his comment here: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/804.html)

Why do we keep doing that when a) thats never been documented as standard way of encoding and b) this is the purpose of CDATA in the XML specification.


Posted by Timothy Appnel at

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