[ietf-calsify] XML iCalendar issues and questions

[Steven Lees]

Tim Hare wrote:

"I'm not an implementer (currently) but I think separating out all the elements of date and time doesn't gain that much - there are well-developed libraries of routines for parsing dates in ISO format, I believe,  so it should not be that costly to extract the date-time value as in xCard and deal with it."

As you'd expect, we discussed this quite a bit. We did have a preference for the format shown in the current draft, but if there's strong opinion the other way I don't think any of the co-authors would strongly object to a single element.

Tim also wrote:

"My next comment is more of a question.  I would have mapped components and properties (VEVENT, DTSTART) to XML elements, and all property parameters to attributes - for example

    <ATTACH fmttype="text/plain" encoding="BASE64" value="binary">...</ATTACH>

Can you tell me what the thought process was for having so few attributes?"

It's been a while since we settled on that part of the format, so I don't remember all of the reasons. One reason was that there are a couple of multi-valued parameters such as delegated-from and delegated-to, and we didn't want to have to stuff all of the values in a single attribute string. We could have special-cased those parameters, but we wanted to maintain consistency if possible to make implementation easier. We were also leaning slightly away from attributes because if you don't use them at all, then you can do a simple translation between XML and JSON.

Steven


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