Re: A structured format for dates?

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Indeed; I could see e.g., browser dev tools automatically presenting a header that it knows is a date  in a friendly way. The only potential issue comes up when it's not recognised as such.

If we decide not to do this, I'm absolutely fine with it; it just means that it's likely things like Deprecation will continue to use a String for dates, whereas Retrofit will use e.g., Integer.

Cheers,


> On 16 Jun 2022, at 5:34 pm, Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The resistance is probably the result of wanting to be able to read the header as it appears in logs.  I still find this to be challenging with seconds-since-epoch.
> 
> That said, I no longer believe that readable is a requirement for wire formats.  Tools can do a lot to cover any shortcomings.
> 
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2022, at 16:04, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> Personally, I tend to agree with PHK - I think that Integer (or 
>> Decimal) is adquate and appropriate.
>> 
>> However, some people seem to keep on pushing back on this - I think 
>> especially for application-focused headers it's more visible. If we're 
>> going to do something, retrofit is a good opportunity for it, since 
>> we're defining SF-Date and friends.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> 
>>> On 16 Jun 2022, at 3:46 pm, Poul-Henning Kamp <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> --------
>>> Mark Nottingham writes:
>>> 
>>>> I'd love to hear what people think about this issue:
>>>> https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/issues/2162
>>> 
>>> I've added this comment:
>>> 
>>> 	I see no mention of fractional seconds ?
>>> 
>>> 	I think we need to ponder that, if the goal is (eventual) convergence for all timestamps in HTTP ?
>>> 
>>> 	Considering how much effort we spend on speeding up HTTP, I find the "human readable" argument utterly bogus.
>>> 
>>> 	Only a very tiny fraction of these timestamps are ever read by humans, and most are in a context where software trivially can render the number in 8601 format if so desired.
>>> 
>>> 	In terms of efficiency, I will concede that, in a HTTP context, it is almost always possible to perform the necessary calculations and comparisons on raw ISO-8601 timestamps, without resorting to the full calendrical conversions, but once all the necessary paranoia is included, I doubt it is an optimization.
>>> 
>>> 	My preference is sf-decimal seconds since epoch, (and this is largely why sf-decimal has three decimals in the first place), because it gives us fast processing, good compression and millisecond resolution.
>>> 
>>> 	PS: A Twitter poll with only 40 respondents, carried out on the first monday after new-years ? Really ?!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
>>> [e-mail]         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
>>> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
>>> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/