[uf-discuss] Expressing an event that only has an end date?

[Brian Suda]

On 1/21/07, Costello, Roger L. <costello at mitre.org> wrote:

> Question #1:
>
> I want to use vevent to markup this information.  Notice that there is
> only one date specified - May, 1998 - which is the ending date of his
> education.
>
> What do I use as the start date (i.e., the value of dtstart)?

--- well OFFICIALLY in the iCalendar spec, nothing is required (which
seems abit strange), but we have always said that 'summary' and
'dtstart' are required, because that makes the most sense as a
minumum. In your case you only want a DTEND. Now technically a DTSTART
is not required, but i have no idea what would happen in a calendar
app if you tried to import that.

One simple work around is to do something like:
<abbr title="1998-05-01" class="dtend dtstart dtstamp">May '98</abbr>

Then you atleast get a start and end date and calendar apps might be
slightly more friendly.

> Question #2
>
> How do I markup a date such as "May, 1998"?  Notice that there is no
> day specified.  Do I assume it to be May 1, 1998, and mark it up as
>
> <abbr class="..." title="1998-05-01">May 1998</abbr>

--- you can certainly just add the '-01' and/or omit the day portion.
It will still be a valid ISO date with just "1998-05" although i have
no idea what will happen when you try to import that into outlook or
other calendar apps.

I would suggest that you create either the hCalendars, one with no
'-01' and with it. Same for the Question #1, create an hCalendar with
no start date and a start and end date of the same time. Then send-us
the URLs and we as a community can test them in different calendaring
applications. I honestly don't know what will happen and who will
support what, or how it would even be represented in the GUI.

Once we have documented application behavior then we can better make a
recommendation of the "prefered" way to mark-up the data for best
interoperability.

-brian

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk