RE: [Ietf-caldav] Re: iCalendar to XML transform

Hi,

I think what you are trying to do is great.  I would dare suggest a
slightly different approach.  I talked to Brian Mosley and Ted Leung a
month or so back but didn't have the time to follow up.

The problem imho is that there is no such thing as trivial XML.  To be
really useful and interoperable the semantics needs to be expressed via
an xml schema.  Unfortunately xCal does not seem to go anywhere, Doug
Royer is not active anymore in these communities as it seems.  And that
was a DTD not an XML schema anyway.  RDF is a tricky way to go.

I went the same path more than a year ago.  I approached the whole thing
from the web services perspective.  Web Services are defined by WSDL,
which mandates schema.  I worked with a project that became apache CXF
and would like to support an xml based programming model but use CalDAV
on the wire (it may not be obvious what I mean, but it's quite simple).
To make a long story short I do have an xml schema that maps iCal to XML
and started to work on a parser that reads iCal and emits SAX/StAX.
It's a java implementation, but antlr supports other languages too.

I won't attach the schema (again), but please let me know and I will
submit it again.  I consider it near complete, it is my work, but it's
public domain, no strings attached.  If anybody is interesting in
helping me with the parsing/web services stuff that'd be great.
Adapting existing parsers to produce valid xml according to this schema
would work too.

Regards,
Hadrian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-caldav-bounces@osafoundation.org [mailto:ietf-caldav-
> bounces@osafoundation.org] On Behalf Of Kervin L. Pierre
> Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 11:53 AM
> To: Norman Walsh; Tim Hare
> Cc: ietf-caldav@osafoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [Ietf-caldav] Re: iCalendar to XML transform
> 
> 
> --- Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> wrote:
> > function that could load the file. An easier
> > solution might be to write
> > a simple pre-processor in your favorite scripting
> > language to turn the
> > .iCal into trivial XML. You could just wrap the
> 
> I agree.  And as more and more people are going
> to be doing this to leverage the tons of XML
> code/apps/technologies out there standardising
> this iCalendar grammer will become increasingly
> important.
> 
> Does this relate to...
> http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-hare-xcalendar/
> in anyway?
> 
> Is anything happening with xCal?
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-royer-calsch-xcal-03
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-rdfcal-20050929/ ?
> 
> Would be nice if one of those grammers gained some
> some momentum... :)
> 
> Best regards,
> Kervin
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