Subject: [ietf-calsify] a few comments about draft-daboo-et-al-icalendar-in-xml

From: Wolfgang Sourdeau <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:20:37 -0400

Hi everyone,

I would like to submit a few comments about the 
"draft-daboo-et-al-icalendar-in-xml" draft.

What I like about this draft is the parallelism with the versit tree and 
keywords. I believe it's a good thing considering that one could want to 
use the same base classes for exporting a versit version and an xCal 
version of the same iCalendar object.
With that in mind, I have a few critics:

1) about value typing: I think this feature should be dropped 
altogether. The reasons being:
 - it's useless considering the fact that properly written parsers 
*must* validate the data that's fed to them anyways, therefore requiring 
from them the prior "knowledge" of the underlying value types
 - it's inconsistent within the spec.
   - example 1: "version" has a type of "text" while it really should be 
"float"
   - example 2: the property attributes are not typed, while they should 
as consistency would require
   - example 3: the same applies to multi-value properties such as 
"rrule", where each subvalue keyword is a type in itself
 - it bloats the output (minor reason)
2) there is a small but bothering inconsistency between the iCalendar 
"RRULE" and the xCal "rrule". With iCalendar, one can specify the 
"BYDAY" value with the week and day next to one another. In xCal, those 
are actually sub-subvalues with different keywords ("ordwk" and 
"weekday"). By looking at it, I suspect that this would be meant to fix 
some inconsistency in the iCalendar format itself where "BYDAY" may or 
may not have a week number, depending on the specified frequency. 
Nonetheless, fixing this in this spec causes more trouble than it solves 
since, code-wise, it must be represented differently in memory depending 
on the output format, where the iCalendar repr. would make use of a 
simple monolithic "subvalue" where the xcal repr. would make use of two 
"sub-subvalues". Therefore, by example, instead of this:

<rrule>
 <freq>YEARLY</freq>
 <bymonth>3</bymonth>
 <byday>
   <ordwk>2</ordwk>
   <weekday>SU</weekday>
 </byday>
</rrule>

... it would be better to have this, in my opinion:
<rrule>
 <freq>YEARLY</freq>
 <bymonth>3</bymonth>
 <byday>2SU</byday>
</rrule>

I hope you fill find these comments useful and I wish you a good day!

-- 
Wolfgang Sourdeau  ::  +1 (514) 447-4918 ext. 125  ::  [email-masked]
Inverse inc. Leaders behind SOGo (sogo.nu) and PacketFence (www.packetfence.org)

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