[uf-dev] hCard locations in hCalendar

[Ryan King]

On Apr 3, 2007, at 10:34 PM, Michael MD wrote:

>> However, it turns out that, per RFC 2445, section 4.8.1.7,  
>> LOCATION  can
>> take an ALTREP parameter, which is "a URI that points to  directory
>> information with more structured specification of the  location".  
>> So, in
>> addition to the text, we can give a link to a  structured  
>> representation.
>
> Is this supported at all by the more common iCal clients?

I have no idea. I'd like to investigate that next.

> If it is I would be VERY interested in it and certainly interested  
> in ways
> to transform it to/from hCal/hCard  - I've been looking for ages  
> for a good way to specify cities and
> countries without having to resort to looking for place names in  
> freeform
> text! (but it would need to work in real-world calendar software  
> people are
> using out there) - this is the main reason why I have not been able to
> implement iCalendar publishing properly here! - the event listings  
> here NEED
> the city and country!
>
> How would people enter such a location url in a calendar client?...
> I don't think I ever saw any such option in Mozilla Sunbird (which  
> is what
> I'm mostly using to test iCal format stuff)...
> maybe I'll try creating such an iCalendar entry manually to see how  
> Sunbird
> displays it.

Apples iCal.app only allows plaintext in the location field (unless  
I'm missing something).

>
>> This brings up several issues.
>>
>> Assumption: if an agent is consuming iCalendar, they'd prefer to   
>> consume
>> vCard, rather than hCard.
>
> is it widely supported? ... I think Outlook can read vCard... but I  
> gave up
> trying to get it to read or write iCalendar
> format for more than one event at a time (can this be done in  
> Outlook?)...

I think there are a number of people who use iCalendar with X2V.

>> 1. How could a service like X2V handle this?
>>
>>   * It could supply links (piped through X2V's vCard service) to  
>> a  vCard
>> for the location. Ex (from: http://austin.adactio.com/, @id  added):
>>
>>   <span class="location vcard" id="six">
>>     <span class="fn org">Six</span>,
>>     <abbr class="geo adr" title="30.266128;-97.743816">
>>       <span class="street-address">117 West 4th St</span>
>>     </abbr>
>>   </span>
>>
>>   could be transformed to:
>>
>>   > LOCATION;ALTREP="http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://
>> austin.adactio.com/%23six": Six 117 West 4th St
>
>>   Note that for cases where there is more than one hCard on a  
>> page,  the
>> fragment identifier is extremely useful (probably necessary).
>>
>>   * it *could*, in theory, use multipart MIME. Has this ever been   
>> done
>> for HTTP?
>>
>> 2. How can we specify this in our test suite?
>>
>>  * MIME CIDs, though ugly, would keep things in one file
>>  * putting the vCards in separate vcf files. (not sure if ALTREP  
>> can  take
>> a relative URI, though. it should right?)
>
> is this widely supported? ... I'm also looking for ways to  
> represent other
> fields that are not part of the normal iCalendar spec.

I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm talking about how we can  
represent this in our test suite, which, AFAIK has nothing to do with  
exising iCalendar implementations. This also has nothing to do with  
representing fields that aren't part of the spec.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com