Re: iCalendar as an XML DTD

[Barry Pederson <bpederson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@ACM.ORG]
>
> Straw poll.  Who here *wouldn't* like to be able to present and interact
> with calendars via style sheets in a browser?
> 
> MB

I'd have to say I'd be in favor of coming up with an XML syntax for
iCalendar data.  Even forgetting web browsers, there'll be plenty of XML
parsers, tools, and utilities that could be brought to bear on
XML-iCalendar data, that would have to be completely rewritten to work
with the current syntax.

Of course the current work will have to go forward and be the minimum
required syntax for some time to come.  But I think a lot of people will
be interested in XML-iCalendar, and there might as well be a standard
for it, and it might as well be this group that comes up with it.

It should be possible to come up with a DTD that keeps the -semantics-
of iCalendar objects that have been all hashed out, and just uses the
new -syntax- of XML.  If it's done right, it should be possible to
translate between the two syntaxes with no loss of information.

It's too bad the timing of these two developments (iCalendar and XML)
wasn't a little different.  I'm sure that if XML had come first, and
someone had said "nah...let's not use that and come up with our own
similar but incompatible syntax", they'd have been laughed out the door.

   Barry