- From: Dan Winship <dan.winship@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:28:45 -0400
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- CC: Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org>, 'HTTP Working Group' <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Julian Reschke wrote: > Yes, the 2-digit dates are a can of worms. This is a mess, we do both > say "MUST accept", but then do not say what it means. And we *can't* just assert a meaning arbitrarily, since we also forbid implementations to send them, and so by definition, if you receive an rfc850-date, then you've received it from an implementation that doesn't obey our rules... > That being said, changing a normative requirement from RFC2616, even if > it's underspecified, is something we shouldn't do lightly. Has anyone even seen an rfc850-date in the wild recently? Anyway, if you really want to nail their semantics down, RFC 2616 and 1945 (HTTP/1.0) both say that the Date header has "the same semantics as orig-date in RFC 822", and RFC 822 says that "If included, day-of-week must be the day implied by the date specification." Since HTTP's rfc850-date syntax requires the day of week to be present, then if we just say implementations SHOULD assume all rfc850-dates refer to years between 1900 and 2299, then they are no longer ambiguous, merely annoying. "Monday, 18-May-09 19:16:46 GMT" is today, and "Tuesday, 18-May-09 19:16:46 GMT" was 100 years ago. -- Dan
Received on Monday, 18 May 2009 19:29:22 UTC