Re: [htdig] further info on last modified issue

[Vince L. <vj...@uc...>]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Gilles Detillieux saved the day:

} Back in July 2001, the 3.2.0b4 snapshots of htdig did not support
} RFC 1123 date formats in meta tags.  They do now, because of a switch
} to a more generalized date parsing method, but that won't help Vince.
} He should stick to ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD is all that this snapshot
} will parse), which is apparently the standard date format for use in
} meta date tags anyway.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Using ISO 8601 format has saved the day; 
htsearch now shows the last modified day as 2002-10-19, as it should. 

FWIW, according to RFC 1945, section 10.10 [for HTTP/1.0] and RFC 2068,
section 14.29 [for HTTP/1.1], RFC 1123 *is* the standard date format for
meta date tags, not ISO 8601. Any chance htdig will go back to supporting 
RFC 1945/2068?

} In htdig -vvv output, when it displays "time: ...", this only means it
} got that date string and it's about to attempt to parse it - it's not
} a confirmation that it did parse it correctly.  If it can't parse it,
} it will silently ignore it.

Aaah. Ok, that's good to know. As you probably can tell, I'm new to htdig, 
but I did try and read all the docs I could find. Apparently I missed the 
debugging documentation. 

So, let me make sure I got this straight, because I didn't notice any 
difference in the -vvvvv output between the two runs of htdig:

Tag: META name="date" content="2002-10-19", matched 20
time: 2002-10-19
[...]
Tag: META name="date" content="Sat, 19 Oct 2002 21:10:54 GMT", matched 20
time: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 21:10:54 GMT

The first two lines are from the newly created page with the ISO 8601 
formated date field, while the last 2 lines are from my previous attempt 
using RFC 1123 formats. How can I tell, from the above -vvvvv output, that 
the 2002-10-19 string was properly parsed? I didn't see any other mention 
of Oct 19th in the log file. The only way I know that 2002-10-19 was 
parsed properly is by running a search and seeing the 'last modified' 
htdig varable defined as Oct 19, 2002. 

Thanks again for your help, Gilles, I appreciate it!

/vjl/

-- 
Vince LaMonica               UC Irvine,  School  of  Social Ecology
 W3 Developer       <*>      116 Social Ecology I, Irvine, CA 92697
 vj...@uc...                  http://www.seweb.uci.edu/techsupport

                       E Pluribus UNIX.