[Ietf-caldav] freebusy lookups in CalDav are too hard to consume?

[Robert Yates]

Helge Hess wrote:

> On 30. Mai 2006, at 01:01 Uhr, Kervin L. Pierre wrote:
>
>> (i) DOM and XPath gives manipulating XML a strong
>> advantage.
>
>
> Do you really need this for _freebusy_? I mean its just two time  
> items and a status ... ;-)
>
I think it depends what you are going to be doing with the freebusy time 
once you have parsed it.  One of the things that we frequently do with 
freebusy time is convert it to (x)html for rendering.  If the freebusy 
time was in xml then one xslt script, utilizing xpath, is all you need.  
You can even do this in the browser using xmlhttprequest to issue an 
HTTP GET and retrieve the response.

Another advantages of using an HTTP GET method and XML payloads for 
freebusy lookups is that browsers support both of them.  No browser that 
I know of supports the REPORT method in its XMLHttpRequest options.  The 
soon to be standard for XMLHttpRequest 
http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/#dfn-open also does not support it. 
All the browsers also contain an XML parser and an XSLT processor. 

Wouldn't we want browsers to be able to easily make freebusy time 
lookups. The browser as a client seems like a really important use case 
to me.

Rob