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.

... and Mike delivers a rant about the IMS site not 'getting' the small, loose standards that make the web work.

As an aside... I tried to find a permalink for this article on the IMS site, but was utterly shocked to discover there is none - just the 'past news' URL en bloc. Now, in my opinion trackback, RSS and other permalink-based mini-standards have done much more for education than any number of big, specifically education standards (which are what the IMS site is about). And the REST-ful web has done more than anything to make the web a useful experience for learners (REST is an architectural theory about the web which boils down to a few simple principles such as always making sure that URLs make sense and that all content can be reached from a sensible URL). I am tempted to surmise that the IMS site's prominent ignorance of these small, loose but very powerful standards is quite telling :o)

NB - this item also point to the relevant news about an abstract spec - as opposed to JAVA API - forthe Open Service Definitions.