Re: RSS 1.0/calendar walkthough and discussion

["wkearney99" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> http://ilrt.org/discovery/2002/01/cal-rss/issues.html
> I'd be grateful for feedback.

Dates do not have to include time.  I don't know that times can omit 
dates.  We're talking events here so they're going to have a date 
associated with them.  Recurring items, one supposes, wouldn't 
include a specific date.  But is that something that has to exist for 
feed driven event data?

Use UTC time and let your local client handle offsetting it properly 
to suit your local zone.  It's paramount to understand the local time 
as it applies for the item itself.  

Consider these two:
1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 
1994-11-05T13:15:30Z 

They both pertain to the exact same interval in time.  But the first 
one tells me it's happening at -05:00 offset from GMT.  This is 
commonly used for US Eastern Standard Time.  Can I reasonable assume 
it's occuring (geographically) within that area's timezone?  

Now, should a feed contain strictly UTC times and an overall feed 
time zone?  Or should items be able to contain their own timezone 
data?  

It seems like a time is a time.  It's a client side issue that 
handles presenting that to you in an understandable fashion.  There 
are some real issues here concerning the proper calculation of a UTC 
time when you've got offsets and adjustments to consider.  Ick, now 
my head hurts...

As for compatibility with iCal, why bother?  I'm being semi-serious 
here.  That seems more like a job for the glue logic between the 
collection of the feed and turnover to something expecting iCal.

Seeing as how many things are using iCal (not) it doesn't seem like 
it's worth that much work to force it's issues onto event feeds.  
Learn from iCal, certainly, but don't be a slave to it.

I'm seeing this event feed idea as a way to push event data.  I'm not 
seeing it as the storage mechanism you're going to use locally.

-Bill Kearney