On the Soapbox

I'm genuinely curious about this: what the heck were they thinking in RFCs 822 and 2822 when they set the format for date-time? Why does the format look like "Sun, 20 Oct 2002 23:47:15 GMT" instead of "2002/10/20 23:47:15 GMT"? Okay, the day-of-week is optional, thank goodness, but was it really necessary to force the use of named months instead of a numerical month? Why expend that extra effort (albeit not that much, but I guess it could add up if you're working with a lot of data and this was 1982) converting from a numerical value to text and back again? Not to mention, the burden added to the programmer. Imagine doing that with C. Not that it's difficult or time-consuming, but just one more annoying thing to have to take care of.

I just added support for "conditional GETs" to kBlog after noticing that Apache was logging script errors for the 304 response code, which meant that kBlog had to parse the If-Modified-Since line in the request header. Great. So it's either load an extra module (Date::Parse) or manually parse the string and feed it to POSIX::mktime. Neither of which is difficult thanks to power of Perl (this blog entry probably took just as long to do), but it's the principle of the matter: what good comes out of this inefficiency in the specification?