RSS feeds and time zones

[IanReardon]

Does anyone know what is the standard practice to use for the time on
RSS feeds? Do they use GMT or the local time of where the feed is
produced? I'm using a lot of feeds from different locations and I
wan't to normalize the time.

Thank you

Ian

 

[Andy Dingley]

Does anyone know what is the standard practice to use for the time on
RSS feeds?

There isn't one. It's a mix of RFC-822 and ISO-8601. Now that's
according to the specs - implementations are even worse. It's
_supposed_ to at least be labelled with a timezone, but even that's
optimistic for some feed generators.

RSS is a swamp. Read the Wikipedia article and follow the links from
it, especially the "Dive Into Mark" blog ones. Don't expect standards-
conformance from live RSS though.

Given the choice, dump the lot and switch to Atom. At least the Atom
people knew how to write a consistent spec.