Issue 163, was: Meaning of invalid but well-formed dates

Brian Smith wrote:
> Everything is clearly specified, but you need to navigate a circuitous route
> to find the definitions. HTTP-date time is defined in terms of RFC 1123's
> date construct. RFC 1123's date construct is just RFC 822's date-time
> extended to support four-digit years. RFC 822 already restricted date-time
> constructs to semantically valid dates. RFC 2822 obsoleted RFC 822 and RFC
> 5322 obsoleted 2822. RFC 5322 clearly specifies the meaning of each
> component of the date-time construct, including four-digit years.
> 
> The HTTP spec. shouldn't be referencing RFC 1123 anymore. RFC 1123's date
> construct isn't really the same as what HTTP calls rfc1123-date so the name
> is misleading; "date-time" could be a better name. If the components of
> HTTP-date were renamed to match the names in RFC 5233 then the specification
> could then say:
> 
>    The semantics of <date-time>, <day-name>, <day>,
>    <month-name>, <year>, and <time-of-day> are the
>    same as the semantics of the RFC 5322 constructs
>    with the corresponding name.
> 
> Also, the statement "[...]; it MUST be sent in rfc1123-date format" should
> be removed from section 8.3 (Date), because section 3.2.1 already says:
> 
>    [Implementations] MUST only generate the RFC 1123 format for
>    representing HTTP-date values in header fields.
> 
> It is straightforward to replace the other RFC 1123 references with RFC 5322
> references.
> ...

I have opened <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/163>, 
tracking this.

BR, Julian

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 15:45:37 UTC