Again on feeds in Gemini format

[Solderpunk]

On Thu Nov 19, 2020 at 6:59 PM CET, Jason McBrayer wrote:

> Should the datestamp be *just* a date? Or should it include a timestamp?
> This would be useful mainly for posts in the same day that have some
> natural ordering (ie replies to one another). If it has a timestamp,
> should it be 2020-11-19T17:01:26+00:00, 2020-11-19T17:01:26Z, or
> 20201119T170126Z, or are any of these good?

I did wonder about this.  ISO 8601 does make the time format clear.
However, a big part of the appeal for me of this approach is that it
allows a single text/gemini index to function for both machine
subscription and ordinary reading by human eyeballs.  I agree with Drew
that full blown timestamps like 2020-11-19T17:01:26+00:00 are not very
human readable.  Requiring this would make gemlog indices look ugly and
cluttered for human users, which would be a shame - especially as the
time information does not strike me as terribly important.  The
majority of phlogs and gemlogs do not receive more than one update a
day.  In the majority of exceptions to this, the two posts on the same
day do not make important references to each other and so reading them
out of order is not a big deal.  It's true this may cause occasional
problems with response threads.  But scope for serious confusion doesn't
appear until we have multiple posts in the same thread by the same
author on the same day, and I don't think it's the worst thing in the
world if some features of Geminispace act to discourage that kind of
high-paced discussion.  Most of us are here to discover a slower way of
computing, and there's always mailing lists or IRC for lengthy
discussions.

So, I think we'll probably be just fine with date stamps only.

Cheers,
Solderpunk