Working Ideas

Tantek Çelik, of Technorati and microformats.org ( and a css / web standards guru :o), posts this microformat proposal. I'd been thinking about similar issues just moments ago, having posted an event-news item in ossite's open-news blog and wondered about sucking the event information out of it for calendars...

The iCalendar standard (RFC2445), has been broadly interoperably implemented (e.g. Apple's "iCal" application built into MacOSX).

In addition, bloggers often discuss events on their blogs -- upcoming events, writeups of past events, etc. With just a tad bit of structure, bloggers can discuss events in their blog(s) in such a way that spiders and other aggregators can retrieve such events, automatically convert them to iCalendar, and use them in any iCalendar application or service.

This specification introduces the hCalendar format, which is a 1:1 representation of the aforementioned iCalendar standard, in semantic XHTML. Bloggers can both embed hCalendar events directly in their web pages, and style them with CSS to make them appear as desired. In addition, hCalendar enables applications to retrieve information about such events directly from web pages without having to reference a separate file.

He notes as well that:

The iCalendar standard (RFC2445) forms the basis of hCalendar.

Note: the editor and authors of this specification are tracking the "iCal-Basic" effort and intend to base the core hCalendar profile on iCal-Basic. See references for a link to the current draft.

The basic format of hCalendar is to use iCalendar object/property names in lower-case for class names, and to map the nesting of iCalendar objects directly into nested XHTML.