Re: A structured format for dates?

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 <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> 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
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | 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/