On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 10:44:55AM -0600, thelema wrote:
> I disagree with you about the relative complexity of the two formats,
> but anyway.

Well, reality is on my side, just look at the fact that CofE, probably
one of the most sophisticated freesite authors, has opted not to support
forward/backwards links.

> The main reason the change was made is because everything else is hex.

Usability should never take second place to a purely asthetic
consideration.

> Also, time in seconds since the epoch is as good a time system as any,

Not if you talk to freesite authors, many are furious that we have made
life more difficult for them for no good reason.

> having the very nice advantage over the "readable" dates of being much
> easier to compute with. 

Give me just one example of where it would be significantly more
difficult to "compute" with the old style versus the new style...

> 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.

Yes, but with the old mechanism a human could do it in their head which
is even better.

>  One could even have a
> pre-processor that changes <TOMORROW> to tomorrow's date and <YESTERDAY>
> to yesterday's date in hex.

What about 2 days ago, 5 days ago etc...

> 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.

How many complaints did we receive from freesite authors about the old
mechanism?  How many did we receive about the new mechanism?  I rest my
case.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Clarke                                        ian at freenetproject.org
Founder & Coordinator, The Freenet Project    http://freenetproject.org/
Chief Technology Officer, Uprizer Inc.           http://www.uprizer.com/
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