[uf-discuss] hCal issues: organizer=vCard and value concatenation

[Scott Reynen]

I'm working on a site that will list concerts with multiple bands,  
and this should be a great use case for hCalendar, but I'm running  
into some problems with my desired arrangement of content, e.g.:

<div class="vevent">
	<div class="vcard organizer">
		<h2 class="summary">March 6th, 2007 at <span class="fn org">The  
Black Sheep</span></h2>
		<p class="adr"><span class="locality">Colorado Springs</span>,  
<span class="region">CO</span></p>
	</div>
	<div class="description">
		<div class="band">
			<h3><span class="attendee vcard"><a href="http://myspace.com/ 
valientthorr" class="fn url">Valient Thorr</a></span> at <abbr  
class="dtstart" title="2007-03-06T20:00:00-08:00">8:00 pm</abbr></h3>
			<p class="value">w/ Fu Manchu</p>
		</div>
		<div class="band">
			<h3><span class="attendee vcard"><a href="http://myspace.com/ 
fumanchu" class="fn url">Fu Manchu</a></span> at <abbr class="dtend"  
title="2007-03-06T21:30:00-08:00">8:30 pm</abbr></h3>
			<p class="value">w/ Valient Thorr, Artimus Pyledriver</p>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

My main problem is the class="vcard organizer".  The hCal spec [1]  
says "ORGANIZER in iCalendar may be represented by an hCard in  
hCalendar," so that's what I'm doing.  I want the class="fn org" to  
be part of the vCard, so I need to wrap the vCard around both the  
<h2> and the <p>, which I can do in the vCard without the date being  
included, as the date isn't wrapped in any vcard properties.  But the  
two hCal->vCal parsers I've tried (X2V and a bookmarklet in Safari of  
a source I can't presently remember) both include "March 6th, 2007  
at" as part of the organizer, even though it's not part of the  
vCard.  Is this behavior correct?

My second issue is with class="description" and class="value".  I was  
hoping the class="value" would restrict the description to just  
concatenations of those nodes, as the hCard parsing [2] suggests:
> For all properties, if the element for a property has one or more  
> children with a class name of "value", then concatenate the node  
> values for all those child elements with class name of "value", in  
> their document order, and use that concatenation as the value of  
> the property.

But that doesn't happen.  Is there a reason this is only applied to  
hCard and not hCalendar, or even all microformats?  It would also be  
nice to be able to do concatenation using class="value" with the  
dtstart and dtend as well, as my date and time are somewhat distant  
in this markup.

My final issue is that I don't know the time zone for events right  
now (or rather my system doesn't - I actually know where Colorado  
is).  I may be able to derive the time zone from the location at some  
point, but for now, I'm just using the time zone of my host server.   
 From writing an hCal parser, I know that almost no one uses accurate  
time zones in hCalendar markup, and now that I'm doing my first  
multiple-zone hCalendar publishing, I see why.  It's a lot of work to  
figure out a numeric representation of a time zone (especially  
considering daylight savings) for machines when humans can infer time  
zones from locations.  I wonder if we could come up with some  
algorithm by which parsers could make the same location to time zone  
inferences to remove the burden of time zone complications from  
publishers.  That's not really something I expect to solve in this  
markup - just a thought.

While you're improving my markup, if anyone sees any other  
opportunities to make this more meaningful beyond the issues I  
mentioned, I'd appreciate hearing them.  Thanks.

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing#class_value_handling

Peace,
Scott