What should readers do with items where date_modified is present but date_published is not?

[dmbaturin]

Blog posts are rarely modified after publishing, but for other applications the opposite is true. Consider a feed for a wiki, or a project documentation site. The date when a wiki page was created is mostly irrelevant, while its modifications is what people may want to keep up with.

Example feeds always have date_published, and no guideline is given. Atom RFC doesn't have a guideline for handling a situation with <published> missing but <updated> though in practice many feeds omit <published> and <updated> is what readers consider important.

It would be nice to codify the recommended behaviour for JSONFeed.

[brentsimmons]

Good question. I would think showing the updated date would be the thing to do — it seems clear that the intent of the feed creator is that the published date isn’t important, while the updated date is.

[dmbaturin]

@brentsimmons Shall I make a PR?

[brentsimmons]

Yes — please do.