[uf-discuss] Date-time formats in hCalendar

[Bob Jonkman]

This is what Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> said
about "Re: [uf-discuss] Date-time formats in hCalendar" on 23 Aug 2006 at 21:47

> If your problem is specifically with Time Zones, in hCalendar you can
> use the ISO datetime[1]
> 
> YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS-ZZZZ
> 2006-08-23T21:45:00-0600
> 
> the transformating application will normalize that to a UTC time
> 2006-08-24T03:45:00Z
> 
> Which is a valid datetime for iCalendar

I would think that 20060824T034500Z would be the valid iCalendar syntax, but point taken -- 
the transforming app does all the work.  My concern was really with the two different date-
time formats in the examples.


> Somewhere along the line, it might be mentioned in the mailing list or
> irc archives? we talked about allowing the punctuation in the HTML.
> Forcing people to remove them was unrealistic. So any parser should
> accept either with or without punctuation, then remove that
> punctuation to meet the RFC spec.

Then can we say that the date-time format must be either have no punctuation as per RFC2445, 
or have punctuation as per RFC3339? (RFC3339 differs from ISO 8601 in that it allows a 
lowercase T or a space as date-time separator, and lowercase Z as timezone indicator).

The bottom of http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime indicates it was taken from a draft of what 
is now RFC3339 so I'd prefer to make RFC3339 normative rather than the W3C note.  And since 
the ISO 8601 standard isn't openly published I'm not sure it should be used with the CC 
licence used for microformat standards. Other microformats (hReview) use ISO 8601 as the date-
time standard, but I fear this may conflict with the spirit of the copyright notices on the 
various microformat publications. (sorry, IANAL and don't mean to open a can of worms here)



> > Finally, there's a bunch of "@todo" items on the examples page.  If
> > no-one else is working on those I could whip up a few.
> 
> --- that would be great if you could work on them. It is a wiki, so
> the community will itterate on your work as well.

OK, after I come back from a week of camping :-)


One last question on examples:  I see the discussion of transforming UID to id attributes on 
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-brainstorming#UID_handling is immediately followed by 
an example of an invalid id tag (starts with a number).  Is this meant to serve as an example 
of an incorrect transformation?  If so, can the Wiki display this with a red border or 
background as a warning of invalid syntax?  Alternatively, I see other examples that enclose 
the UID inside a <span class="uid"> element.  If that's the preferred format, should the 
examples be changed?

--Bob.