NO NO NO NO!!!!!!
The date format MUST be RFC822 compliant (as is the new RFC1036) and
can be seen in every Date: field generated by NNTP and mail.
RFC 850 was obsolete long ago. I sent the following to httpd@ncsa
when httpd_1.0 came out, but I'm not sure if it got there because my
mail server went down at the same time. Anyways, here is THE format:
5. DATE AND TIME SPECIFICATION
5.1. SYNTAX
date-time = [ day "," ] date time ; dd mm yy
; hh:mm:ss zzz
day = "Mon" / "Tue" / "Wed" / "Thu"
/ "Fri" / "Sat" / "Sun"
date = 1*2DIGIT month 2DIGIT ; day month year
; e.g. 20 Jun 82
month = "Jan" / "Feb" / "Mar" / "Apr"
/ "May" / "Jun" / "Jul" / "Aug"
/ "Sep" / "Oct" / "Nov" / "Dec"
time = hour zone ; ANSI and Military
hour = 2DIGIT ":" 2DIGIT [":" 2DIGIT]
; 00:00:00 - 23:59:59
zone = "GMT" ; Universal Time
whereas the output from httpd_1.0 is like:
----------------------------------------------------------
% telnet www.ics.uci.edu 80
Trying 128.195.13.1 ...
Connected to www.ics.uci.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /ICShome.html HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Monday, 13-Dec-93 12:12:33 GMT
Server: NCSA/1.0
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
Last-modified: Thursday, 09-Dec-93 16:20:08 GMT
Content-length: 1817
Connection closed by foreign host.
----------------------------------------------------------
which matches the RFC850 example but does not match the
format required by netnews and mail. To be a conformant
arpanet message, the output should be:
----------------------------------------------------------
% telnet www.ics.uci.edu 80
Trying 128.195.13.1 ...
Connected to www.ics.uci.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /ICShome.html HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 93 12:12:33 GMT
Server: NCSA/1.0
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
Last-modified: Thu, 9 Dec 93 16:20:08 GMT
Content-length: 1817
Connection closed by foreign host.
----------------------------------------------------------
....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)