RE: [xml-dev] best practice for providing newsfeeds ?

["Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

Title: RE: [xml-dev] best practice for providing newsfeeds ?

By people I meant tools.  I get a few hundred posts a day that show up as “new” when they are old, simply because people have crummy tools that reset the pubDate on *all* posts to be whatever date the feed gets updated.  I also am pretty sure that these people have no idea that their tools are doing this, and don’t lose any sleep over it.  In other words, normal people don’t care about what date gets inserted, and only the techies argue about it.  I don’t believe that the call for multiple date fields is being driven by significant end-user demand.  I think that’s total bull.

 

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From: Dare Obasanjo
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 9:13 AM
To: Joshua Allen; bob@wyman.us; 'Michael Champion'; 'XML DEV'
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] best practice for providing newsfeeds ?

 

I disagree. Most tools insert this date automatically. I'd be very suspicious of a tool that allowed users to directly edit the posting date of an entry, let alone edit the original + posting date. I agree with Bob that having a published + updated date would be useful.

 

--

PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth, minus 40% inheritance tax.

 

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From: Joshua Allen
Sent: Tue 2/3/2004 9:02 AM
To: bob@wyman.us; Dare Obasanjo; 'Michael Champion'; 'XML DEV'
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] best practice for providing newsfeeds ?

> date that it was last modified. So, users get entries that appear  to
> be "old" even when they are "new." This confuses them. The issue here
> has *nothing* to do with data format -- it is a question of semantics,

My experience shows exactly the opposite; people report "new" when actually a post is old.  But in any case, I fail to see how adding another field will stop people from putting the wrong dates in those fields -- the semantics of "pubDate" are remarkably clear, and people still screw it up.  I would bet that in 99% of cases, people screw it up because they don't know better, NOT because "pubDate is the only field available and I really, really, want to store the last-update date in the field". 

Solving user ignorance by adding more features is not very smart.