Benjamin Coates <coates at windmail.net> writes: > Cvs uses getdate, public domain code that parses dates in pretty much any > format you would want (like "August 12" or "5 weeks ago" or "yesterday"...) > into a time number, we could use that to make it extremely easy to specify > which DBR you want.
This cure is worse than the symptom. Of course all the million formats will be used by links on freesites. All freenet implementations, and maybe even a number of supplemental tools will have to support every format. The different programs may not be able to share code (incompatible license, different programming language), and due to the complexity of parsing they will probably all understand slightly different sets of formats. The original problem was that hex-seconds-since-1969 are difficult to generate without computer help (not that anybody would /want/ to generate them when not in front of a computer, but anyway). So a scheme that translates [YYYYMMDDHHMMSS] into the appropriate representation would seem enough. If one ignores spaces, dashes and colons inside the brackets, friendlier representations like [YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS] are instantly possible. Just enough complexity to make people comfortable. I don't recall people crying for the ability to enter [August 12] in Freenet URLs. If relative dates are really wanted, the syntax could be augmented to allow [+n] and [-n] with n being seconds. Yes, you'll need a calculator to compute what 5 weeks worth of seconds are, but freesite authors only need to do that once. -- Robbe -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.ng Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20011203/0b201d93/attachment.pgp>
