hcalendar-faq

hCalendar FAQ

This page is for documenting Q&A about hCalendar.

1. Q: How do I use a class inside when I don't want the element I use it on to be a property of the calendar?
   • A: Use a class name that isn't a defined iCalendar property name.
2. Q: What happens if the class is used both inside and outside ?
   • A: That works fine.
3. Q: What do I do if I want to add styling to a group of calendar events, especially if the calendar contains dynamic content?
   • A: You can write style rules that incorporate both the context of said group (say it is in an ordered list with class name "group" for example) and the events, e.g.:ol.group .vevent { /* insert common styling here */ }
4. Q: What do you do if you don't want the calendar or card to be displayed?
   • A: If you don't want the calendar or card to be displayed, why are you publishing it on the Web?
5. Q: What if you don't want specific properties to show up?
   • A: You can trivially use CSS to hide (or otherwise alter the display) of certain properties. E.g. if you want to hide the "location" from all your VEVENTs you would write a rule like this: .vevent .location { display:none }
6. Q: If we use title for the ISODate, how do we specify a different tooltip?
   • A: For reasons of metadata transparency and visibility, it is recommended that you DO NOT specify a different tooltip. However, if in your particular content or application you must, you can do so with a nested span e.g. Feb. 21st
7. Q: Would the use of <acronym> for DTSTART be just as good as ?
   • A: It could be, but there is no need. The element is also preferred as it is better defined. The <acronym> element, and in particular, the term "acronym" means different things to different people, and thus we are not using it in hCalendar.
8. Q: What happens if a browser doesn't support ?
   • A: Then the human readable contents inside the element are displayed, which is the desirable behavior.
9. Q: How is hCalendar different from xCalendar, i.e. draft iCalendar XML guidelines submitted to the IETF?
   • A: hCalendar and xCalendar are actually very similar in that they are both based on iCalendar standard, RFC2445. However, xCalendar is a way of representing iCalendar files using non-standard XML element names and attributes. This is inadequate and unwieldly for serving on web pages. xCalendar is still a separate, encapsulated document in the context of the web, that requires yet another namespace. Nobody would ever look at an xCalendar XML file in the context of their ordinary browsing, unless it's XSLTed into something else, e.g. hCalendar. On the other hand, hCalendar is easily embeddable into normal XHTML web pages, easily stylable with CSS, cleanly separates human presentable date information vs. machine parsable ISO-8601 dates, etc. With hCalendar, calendar and events content appears both to the human user *and* to hCalendar-aware machine implementations, parsers, indexers, etc., on *today's* web.
10. Q: Can you provide more precise location data for an hCalendar event such at latitude and longitude?
    • A: There is a field in the vCard spec (from which hCard is derived) called 'geo,' which takes a pair of numbers, lat and long, as values.

For more discussions of location data, geographic data, and research into current and potential future formats, see the location formats page.