Re: Duration: Does 1 day == 24 hours?

[John Stracke <francis@xxxxxxxx>]

Alan Davies wrote:

> At 19:18 2001-03-27 -0600, you wrote:
> >A day ends at T235959 on that day. Right? At least this the logical

[...]

> I wouldn't expect your conference to finish at midnight
> though- I'd expect you to use a sensible duration of, say,
> 9 hours

Er...what?

<insert expressions of amazement here>.

This thread is extremely surprising to me.  To me, it's obvious that a duration
is a scalar value that is equivalent to some number of seconds.  To take a
duration of one day and turn it into 15 hours, or 9 hours, or something, just
does not make sense to me.  (The "sensible duration" approach, in particular,
is fraught with peril; who decides what's sensible? The modern 8-hour work day
is a historical artifact left over from the "share the work" sentiment of the
Great Depression.)

An event with a duration of one day is not the same as an all-day event.  An
all-day event is just one that starts at midnight and ends at midnight (or 0900
and 1700, if that's what you prefer); it does not need any kind of special
syntax.  An event with a duration of one day is an event that lasts 24 hours.
It'd be a strange sort of person-to-person meeting, but so what? If iCalendar
were used only for person-to-person meetings, we wouldn't have durations
expressed in weeks, either; nobody meets with someone for three weeks without a
break.  (I was at IETF for a week, for example, but I wasn't meeting with
anybody at 0100; I put it on my calendar as a recurring event.)

To me, the duration should specify the actual length of real time that the
event will take.  If I tell my CUA I expect it to take 24 hours, then my CUA
should be free to express that as 1 day.  If I shift the start of the event and
leave the duration the same, the event should really take the same amount of
real time; it should not have some sort of floating DTEND that gets arbitrarily
pinned to midnight.

Am I the only one here who believes this?

--
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