Now, how is a RSS ag­gre­ga­tor sup­posed to sort these things by date?

• Tue, 07 Oct 2003 23:09:52 GMT

• 20010627T12:40:33

the first ok for a hu­man, but for a com­put­er it is not, vicev­er­sa for the sec­ond :-P

Sad­ly, that is what PyCS and ad­voga­to re­turn in the date field of RSS feed­s.

So, the client is forced to as­sume that:

• That thing must be read­­able some­how for the user, and cant for­­mat it (I try to parse for the ad­vo­ga­­to for­­mat, when it does­nt work I leave it as is)

• Items cant be sort­ed by date cross-feed (ie: give me the lat­est posts from these ten feed­s) be­­cause I have no re­li­able post­ing date, and must use in­­stead the date it was fetched.

Not nice.