$submitted being overwritten in preprocess

Hi guys,

Was wondering if the hard-coded $submitted was necessary and could be permanently removed from Sky? I noticed it was hard-coded when attempting to use the submitted_by module, removing the lines below solved the problem but since this theme is so well maintained I'm sure I'll have to manually remove it in the future again. :)

I don't think this code does anything anymore, other than override $submitted unnecessarily?

In preprocess-node.inc:

// Use Microformats for Dates
if ($vars['submitted']) {
  $vars['submitted'] = t('Posted <abbr class="created" title="!microdate">@date</abbr> by !username', array(
    '!username' => theme('username', $node),
    '@date' => format_date($node->created),
    '!microdate' => format_date($node->created, 'custom', "Y-m-d\TH:i:sO")
    )
  );
}

Thanks!