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

[Paul Wilkins]

Scott Reynen wrote:
> 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?

It depends on what's meant by correct.
Is it what's supposed to be done given the knowledge we know have 
available? Sure thing! Is it what's being supported by the existing 
tools out there, not a chance.

Attendee and Organizer are currently defined as email addresses. Using a 
vcard as the attendee is still in development and to be discussed.
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-brainstorming#Undecided_Encodings_of_Certain_Property_Attributes

When X2V interprets the hCalendar, it uses the existing mailto format 
and extracts everything inside of attendee.

ATTENDEE:MAILTO:Valient Thorr at 8:00 pm w/ Fu Manchu Fu Manchu at 8:30 
pm w/ Valient Thorr\, Artimus Pyledriver

We can tidy that part up by moving the organizer and attendee to their 
most appropriate parts, like their website or failing that, their name

ATTENDEE:MAILTO://myspace.com/valientthorr

> 
> 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:
> 
> 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.

The trouble comes when the computer tries to work out what property to 
assigen those values to.

hCalendar Parsing hasn't been defined yet, so it's still in flux.
In this case you're wanting to join together the names of both bands and 
have them on the mailto field called attendee. There are many problems 
with this, so the best options are to either provide an actual email 
address, or a link to their webpage.

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

The info extracted from this is

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
X-WR-CALNAME;CHARSET=utf-8:Untitled Document
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DESCRIPTION;CHARSET=utf-8:Valient Thorr at 8:00 pm \n w/ Fu Manchu \n\n 
\n Fu Manchu at 8:30 pm \n w/ Valient Thorr, Artimus Pyledriver \n\n \n
SUMMARY;CHARSET=utf-8:March 6th\, 2007 at The Black Sheep
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20070307T040000Z
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20070307T053000Z
ATTENDEE:MAILTO://myspace.com/valientthorr
ATTENDEE:MAILTO://myspace.com/fumanchu
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:The Black Sheep
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

It's still going to be officially wrong, but it's the best you're likely 
to do for now.


-- 
Paul Wilkins