At 1:27 PM -0400 4/5/99, Gilles Detillieux wrote:
>> as an interesting fix for this, couldnt it be possible to assign
>> a meta tag to go in the document header for the document date?
>> How difficult could it be to add this, since htdig is already parsing the
>> meta tags in the header anyway, right?
>
>Take a look at how htdig-notification-date is currently handled.
>You'd need to add similar code and similar fields in the docdb (and in
>DocumentRef) to handle an additional date field, which you could encode
>however you choose. You'd also likely want to add code to sort on this
>new field as well, because the current date sorting sorts on modification
>date, not meta dates. In short, it would probably take a lot of changes
>to do this.
Actually, someone paid me to add some support for this (they wanted to sort
by publication date). I wasn't sure how useful the code would be, so I
didn't commit it. The Dublin Core standard for meta information specifies a
DATE tag with ISO 8601 formatting (YYYY-MM-DD). The code simply uses this
tag if found in preference to the date returned by the server. (This could
become a config option very easily.) I also need to check the
modification_time_is_now option, added to help WWWWoffle. As I remember it,
it sets the modification time to now if the server returns 0.
Interestingly, we also had a discussion about date formats about the same
time. HTML 4.0 specifies a "scheme" portion to META tags, for just such a
question!
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme
The scheme attribute allows authors to provide user agents more
context for the correct interpretation of meta data. At times, such
additional information may be critical, as when meta data may be
specified in different formats. For example, an author might specify a
date in the (ambiguous) format "10-9-97"; does this mean 9 October
1997 or 10 September 1997? The scheme attribute value
"Month-Date-Year" would disambiguate this date value.
Eventually we might want to build scheme support into the parsing, though
there aren't any specifications for what schemes might be!
-Geoff
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