Is there a reason why the RSS feed doesn't use pubDate?

January 10, 2006 3:11 PM

Is there a reason why the RSS feed doesn't use pubDate?
posted by team lowkey to Feature Requests at 3:11 PM (13 comments total)

I know RSS has quite a history of conflicting specs, but pubDate should be valid RSS 0.91. It would be nice to be able to see how old the posts are and be able to sort them by date if I haven't checked the feed in a while. Is there an issue I'm unaware of, or could this be implemented?
posted by team lowkey at 3:13 PM on January 10, 2006

See here. Does that feed look ok? If so, I'll move the feeds up to RSS 2.0.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:36 PM on January 10, 2006

Everyone needs a pub date.
posted by NinjaPirate at 3:39 PM on January 10, 2006

Sweet! Works perfectly well in Thunderbird. Having the author is nice, too. Firefox kicked back this xml error when I clicked the link directly, but I'm guessing that's because there's no standard way to give the author without extending to a new namespace?:

XML Parsing Error: prefix not bound to a namespace
Location: http://xml.metafilter.com/rss2-test.xml
Line Number 19, Column 2: JPowers
posted by team lowkey at 4:01 PM on January 10, 2006

Oh, it looks like that was covered in the previous metatalk. Do you need to include the namespace in the rss tag?
posted by team lowkey at 4:10 PM on January 10, 2006

Self confirmed. Changing the rss tag to read:

rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

...fixed the error.
posted by team lowkey at 4:18 PM on January 10, 2006

I fixed it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:24 PM on January 10, 2006

Ok, I officially moved the RSS feed on mefi over to 2.0. If I get no complaints, I'll update the other feeds this week as well.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:30 PM on January 10, 2006

Super rad. Hopefully the only complaint will be that you gave me a pony that could have gone to someone else. Thanks a ton.
posted by team lowkey at 4:53 PM on January 10, 2006

has anyone seen my pony?
posted by andrew cooke at 5:34 PM on January 10, 2006

Does anyone know if there is a way to get the times right in Safari? The Atom one seems to be using GMT and the RSS one looks like it's PST. I am in neither, of course.
posted by smackfu at 6:49 PM on January 10, 2006

smackfu, due to the nature of RSS, I can't create a custom timestamp for everyone. Your RSS parser should know what to do with them (both feeds tell parsers their timezone, so they should be able to adjust accordingly.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:57 PM on January 10, 2006

Stupid Safari.
posted by smackfu at 10:07 PM on January 10, 2006