HTML 4.0 Sourcebook
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Ian S. Graham
ISBN: 0471257249
Publication Date: 04/01/98

where the first field is the day of the week (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, or Sun), the second is the day of the month (01 to 31), the third is the month (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, or Dec); the remaining hours (0 to 24), minutes, and seconds fields are obvious. The time must be in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), so that all Web applications share a common time zone.

First Alternative Format

An alternative format is defined in RFC 850. An example is:

Wednesday, 09-Aug-94 07:49:37 GMT

where the first field is the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday), the third is the month (as given above), and the remaining fields are obvious. This second format will clearly cause chaos at the end of December 31, 1999, and therefore should be avoided.

Second Alternative Format

This format is defined by the ANSI C language asctime() format. An example date is:

Wed Aug 9 07:49:37 1994

Note that this format does not specify a time zone—the assumption is that the time is in GMT.

References

HTTP Overviews and Specifications

Caching and Proxy Servers

User Authentication, Data Encryption, and Security

Secure Financial Transactions

Browser and Server Comparisons and Benchmarks

Apache Server Content Negotiation

www.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html

Time and Date Formats

ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1123.txt

ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc850.txt

was posed. This is not currently supported.