I subscribed to John Lam's RSS feed today. I noticed that all the dates in SharpReader showed up as "now". That sucks, because it certainly wreaks havoc on the nice hierarchal reading of aggregators like SharpReader by putting all of those posts before any other post, even when the original date may have been months old.
In fact, the problem is that the feed is RSS 0.91 does not specify any date field on individual <item> nodes (even optional).
Huh?
The RSS 2.0 specification is a step in the right direction, as it specifies a <pubDate> element, but it's still optional.
There are a handful of other blogs which do this as well. For one, Windows Developer News on Chris Sells' site is also RSS 0.91 and thus has no date information. While Tim Ewald's feed is RSS 2.0, it also omits the <pubDate>.
For any publishing - weblog or otherwise - isn't the publication date important? Seems to me that should be a required element.