On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Ian Clarke wrote: > A number of people have been complaining about the change from the > simple format for DBRs in 0.3 to the much more complex format used > in 0.4, and I must confess, I am forced to agree with them. This > change adds nothing useful that I can see, but makes life more > difficult for the hapless freesite authors (for example, CofE can > no-longer easily provide links to previous and next editions of his > freesite). > > Why was this change made, and what would be the cost of changing it > back? > > Ian. > I disagree with you about the relative complexity of the two formats, but anyway.
The main reason the change was made is because everything else is hex. Also, time in seconds since the epoch is as good a time system as any, having the very nice advantage over the "readable" dates of being much easier to compute with. As for the difficulty of creating forward and backward links, I maintain it's trivial to have a program generate the hex codes for tomorrow and yesterday. One could even have a pre-processor that changes <TOMORROW> to tomorrow's date and <YESTERDAY> to yesterday's date in hex. I don't have any problems with changing it to the seconds-since-epoch in decimal (if adding 86400 is easier than adding 0x15180), but the old date format was a pile, especially with having the increment being in seconds. Thelema -- E-mail: thelema314 at bigfoot.com If you love something, set it free. GPG 1536g/B9C5D1F7 fpr:075A A3F7 F70B 1397 345D A67E 70AA 820B A806 F95D -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20011127/ac158329/attachment.pgp>
