> 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.
Perhaps he does not understand the way that links should be generated. If he understands then I can't see why he wouldn't be generating the links. It's really easy. The key index insertion/retrieval tool I wrote had flags to insert/request yesterday or tomorrow as well as today, so it's certainly possible. > Give me just one example of where it would be significantly more > difficult to "compute" with the old style versus the new style... Today is January 1st, 2003. You want yesterday's entry. With the new format, no matter what day of what month of what year it is, you subtract 86400 from today's entry and you get yesterday's entry. With the old format you must first subtract one from the day (1). You then check for month rollover. In this case it happens. So you now decrement the month (1). Then you check for year rollover. In this case it happens. So you decrement the year (2003). So now you know it's December, 2002. Next you need to find the day of the month. If the month is not February then you look up which month it is in a table to see how many days that month has. If it is February then you compute the number of days in the month based on the year. In this case it's December so you look up December in the table and get 31. So you set the date to December 31, 2002. Whatever aesthetic or usage concerns you may have, you must admit that this is more difficult to compute than subtracting 86400. > > 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. Most people will need to look at a calendar whenever calculating days that cross month boundaries. Few people know off the top of their head how many days are in April and ever fewer know how many days are in February this particular year. > > 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... 2*86400, 5*86400. So for that you could have a tag like <-5DAYS> or <+5DAYS> or whatever. > 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. I think they probably need to have the format explained to them and perhaps whatever tools the use should be extended to do what they want them to do with less hassle. Whether or not it's easy to generate a DBR by hand, tools should exist to do it for you. Although it would be nice to be easy to generate by hand. I think that could be accomplished by having the format in decimal rather than hex. That way the site authors can break out a calculator instead of a calendar and type DBR-numdays*86400. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
