hcalendar-issues

hCalendar Issues

These are externally raised issues about hCalendar with broadly varying degrees of merit. Thus some issues are REJECTED for a number of obvious reasons (but still documented here in case they are re-raised), and others contain longer discussions. Some issues may be ACCEPTED and perhaps cause changes or improved explanations in the spec. Submitted issues may (and probably will) be edited and rewritten for better terseness, clarity, calmness, rationality, and as neutral a point of view as possible. Write your issues well. — Tantek

See related hcard-issues.

Issues

Please use this format:

• YYYY-MM-DD raised by AUTHORNAME
  1. Issue 1: Here is the first issue I have.
  2. Issue 2: Here is the second issue I have.

• 2005-10-14 raised by MarkoMrdjenovic
  1. UID has to be present in iCal events if they want to be used in Microsoft Outlook. It should probably be added to the vevent tag as html attribute id. There is also the problem of converters - x2v has UID commented out. RFC recommends use of addr format for uids which is problematic in html id (does not validate). HenriBergius pointed out some calendaring software crashes when @ is in the UID, so some other form of identification should be used - along the lines of dtstart-dtend-hash(title,summary)-sample-org
  2. DTSTAMP also has to be present in iCal event for Microsoft Outlook. I think DTSTAMP should be user visible information so implementation with class="dtstamp" is fine. x2v already supports it so it should just be added to the standard and examples. The converters might also think of a way to force (create) dtstamp if it's not present.

• 2005-07-27 raised by Paolo Massa
  1. I tried to add a hcalendar event in my blog but it rendered orribly. The problem was I already have a 'class="summary' in my normal HTML (it is the title of the posts) and my CSS displays it bigger and bold. In this way the summary of the event was as big as the titles of the posts, destroying readability. The problem is Overloading of class attributes, it might be the case that a blogger already use, for example, class="summary" for different purposes. What can be a solution? Providing in every microformat wiki page a CSS file that users can download and insert in their blog as additional CSS. This CSS file will "shield" attribute "inside" microformats from being interpreted as "normal" attributes. For example for the hCalendar microformats the relative CSS could be something like:

.vevent .summary {

//remove all the previously set properties, for example:

text-decoration: none;

font-size: 100%;

...

}

Since the hCalendar microformat is the following,

<a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/">

Web 2.0 Conference:

...

I hope to have been clear but I'm not so sure ;-)

• 2005-07-21 raised by Neil Jensen
  1. should we create a vfreebusy class for HTML representations of freebusy data? Discussion here.

• 2005-07-11 raised by Kragen
  1. The specification of class="url" as <a href="..."> should be a "should", not a "must". Other ways of referencing the event URL, such as <iframe src="..."> and <embed src="...">, shoul be mentioned. At present X2V doesn't appear to handle them. This came up in a discussion about xFolk.

• 2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
  1. Issue H-1: This specification is lacking a user agent conformance section. There's basically nothing that says how hCalendars must be parsed, how to handle errors, and so forth. Is it defined in terms of the DOM? Is it defined in terms of a serialisation? How do you handle unexpected content or missing content?

• 2005-02-22 raised by Matt Raymond on the whatwg list:
  1. There is no copyright statement and no patent statement.
     • ACCEPTED. I have updated hcalendar (and hcard, and all other MicroFormats) with a standard copyright statement and patent statement.

• 2005-02-18 raised by Matt Raymond on the whatwg list:
  1. There is no way for some reading the markup to tell if a class name is the name of an attribute or simply the name of a class used for styling.
     • REJECTED (strawman, poor assumption). There is no need to differentiate in the general case. In the specific case, a vocabulary is defined within a context.
  2. As a result of the above, user agents would not be able to reliably allow users to access extension properties such as "x-mozilla-alarm-default-length" (which is an actual extension used in Sunbird).
     • REJECTED (out of scope). Extension properties are outside the current scope of hCalendar.
  3. The use of for dates is incorrect. "August 5th, 2004" is not the abbreviation of 2004-09-05. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.
     • REJECTED (false statement). This is simply a false statement. See this article for an explanation of this use of : Human vs. ISO8601 dates problem solved
  4. You have to create a complex set of rules for all possible uses of legacy markup within which can easily be implemented incorrectly.
     • REJECTED (false statements, strawman). There is no legacy markup. There is no need to create rules for all possible uses of legacy markup. There is no need to create a complex set of rules.
     • There are styling and tooltip issues that are unresolved.
     • REJECTED (empty statements). See the hCalendar-faq for answers to specific styling and tooltip questions. Otherwise, please raise specific issues here with clear valid examples.
  5. hCalendar/hCard is more complicated for webmasters to read and understand and more complicated for developers to implement.
     • REJECTED (empty statements, invalid comparator). Please state specific examples which show the perceived complexity. The comparison "more complicated" requires two items, no second item was provided.
  6. I dislike the entire system of using class names as markup. Class names should be reserved for user-defined semantics.
     • ACCEPT-PARTIAL. When specific elements are available, they should be used instead of class names, but even then class names work well to "subclass" specific elements. This is thoroughly discussed in the essay A Touch of Class. And yes, class names can and should be used for user-defined semantics. hCalendar is one such user, and it is reasonable for users to use each others class names.

• Would it be more in the spirit of HTML to define these classes in a metadata profile, so that "User agents may... perform some activity based on known conventions for that profile"? Should this be a part of microformats specifications in general? (If not, why not?)
  • ACCEPTED. Yes, all microformats that introduce new classnames SHOULD include an XMDP profile (which itself is a microformat for defining HTML metadata profiles) that defines those classnames.
    • OK, but in order to refer to a profile, it needs a URI. Tantek writes in a message of Jul 21 "This is precisely the reason that GMPG was founded and created, to provide permanent URLs/homes for microformat profiles." How does one cause GMPG to issue a prifile URL?

• 2005-09-29 raised by RyanKing
  1. How does one use ATTENDEE?