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Re: A structured format for dates?

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2022 05:31:49 +0000
Message-Id: <202206170531.25H5VnMD064477@critter.freebsd.dk>
To: Austin William Wright <aaa@bzfx.net>
cc: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
--------
Austin William Wright writes:

> I don't believe 'works 99.999998% of the time" may be 
> good enough.

Well, that's what everything based on POSIX offers today.

Trying to compensate for that deficiency in the HTTP layer is
counter-indicated:  We should take, and trust, the time from the
platform we run on, and handle leap seconds however that platform
does.  If the platform jumps over leap-seconds, we should
follow it, if it smears over them, we should slide along.

> Rather, if support for fractional seconds is important for any reason at 
> all, [...]

Last we talked about it, the CDN people really wanted it for things like
Cache-Control etc.

> Let me propose a different argument for your case: UTC is inherently 
> discontinuous, [...]

and all HTTP relevant practical realizations of UTC have variable
frequency.

But again: Inventing a new time-keeping paradigm for HTTP is a non-starter.

-- 
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.
Received on Friday, 17 June 2022 05:31:59 UTC

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