Mark Pilgrim dives into the RSS date flap...
"It’s FUD. It’s crap. Cut it out.
To recap: in 1982, RFC 822 defined a date format. In 1997, Dave Winer respected prior art by using that date format for the date elements in his syndication format. He could have chosen a different date format, but he didn't, and his choice made good sense at the time. In 1999, Netscape respected prior art by taking elements from Dave's scriptingNews format and not changing the date format. In 2000, Dave Winer continued the RSS 0.9x line and respected his own and Netscape's prior art by not changing the date format. In 2002, Dave Winer respected this entire line of prior art by adding item-level pubDate, with the same date format.
Now, none of this is to suggest that namespaces are bad. That's just ridiculous. Namespaces were the biggest new feature in RSS 2.0; they are the very reason RSS 2.0 is called 2.0 and not 0.94. Yes, using pubDate also respects prior art. But using Dublin Core also respects prior art, just a different lineage of prior art. Using either in RSS 2.0 is absolutely legitimate, and every news aggregator I know of, that cares about dates, supports both.
Furthermore, Dublin Core and ISO 8601 have won in the larger worldwide marketplace. Outside of the Internet, virtually no one uses the RFC (2)822 date format. If I were creating a brand new format today, any kind of format, for any reason, I would absolutely use the ISO 8601 date format. If I were creating an RDF-based format, or an XML-based format for namespace-aware consumers, I would absolutely use Dublin Core, straight up. It's here, it works, it's its own ISO standard. But RSS's pubDate wasn't invented today; it was invented in 1997. It still works, and you can still use it in your RSS if you want. I use Dublin Core."
5:06:52 AM 
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