Funky Time

(With apologies to Pete Seeger)

For every feed, (blog, blog, blog),
There is a time zone (blog, blog, blog),
And a time for every posting under Heaven

RSS feeds can include a time zone indicator in the dc:date or pubDate tag. Presumably, the indicator is set to the time zone of the user who created the article corresponding to that particular tag. But it might actually be set to to the time zone for the server, which can conceivably be different from the time zone of the user.

Now bring the user of an RSS reader into the picture. When the user looks at the time stamp on an article, what does he care about? Does he care what time it was in the author's time zone when the article was posted? Or does he care about what time it was in his own time zone when the article was posted? And given that the author, the blog server, the reader, and (if a server-based RSS reader is being used) the computer that actually pulled in the RSS feed might be in four different time zones, what do you -- the poor writer of an RSS aggregator -- do?

The above thoughts arose from another coversation with Manfred, as we were resolving issues related to how his madicon RSS Reader handles the bogus date tags in my FreeDom Blog feed. As it turns out, both Manfred and I independently reached the same conclusion: What's the point?!! He ignores the time zone info in his Notes-base reader, and I ignored it in my Domino bloggregator. The better solution, of course, would be to allow the user to select a time, click it, and be able to choose between "My Time", and "Original Time", and "Other", but for the tiny percentage of the time when someone might actually care, it seems like an awful lot of work.

Why would it be a lot of work? Isn't it just a simple transformation? No! What if, and trust me... this does happen... the article is posted in a time zone that is observing Daylight Savings Time, but by the time someone reads the post it is no longer Daylight Savings Time in the author's zone, but due to different local customs it is still Daylight Savings Time in the reader's zone?! Time zones are never simple.