Posted by Toby A Inkster on 03/05/07 15:47

j1mb0jay wrote:

> I would like to output the calender in XHTML so that is can be viewable in
> most browsers.

Take a look at hCalendar -- it's a specification that fuses XHTML with
iCalendar, written by Tantek Celik (who was the lead developer of IE for
Mac, but now works for Technorati).

An hCalendar document is a valid XHTML 1.0 document that uses particular
values for class attributes to allow for a 1:1 mapping between iCalendar
and hCalendar documents. For example, the following iCalendar event:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//XYZproduct//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
URL:http://www.web2con.com/
DTSTART:20051005
DTEND:20051008
SUMMARY:Web 2.0 Conference
LOCATION:Argent Hotel\, San Francisco\, CA
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Becomes this in hCalendar:

<span class="vevent">
<a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/">
<span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>:
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2005-10-05">October 5</abbr>-
<abbr class="dtend" title="2005-10-08">7</abbr>,
at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel,
San Francisco, CA</span>
</a>
</span>

And then an hCalendar-aware tool can parse the event information, or could
convert it to iCalendar if need be.

Specification: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
Implementations: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-implementations

For a blogging tool / CMS I'm working on, I decided that the feed engine,
which could already output in several different formats (e.g. RSS, Atom,
RDF, etc) needed a few more. HTML was an obvious choice, and I also
decided on iCalendar. Luckily, while reading the Wikipedia article on
iCalendar I discovered hCalendar, so now my feeds module produces:

RSS 0.91
RSS 1.0 (RDF)
RSS 2.0,
Atom 1.0 (RFC 4287)
iCalendar (RFC 2445)
hCalendar

and a few weirdo ones too.

>> 2. As per above, consider an RSS feed too.
>
> Already using RSS feeds to get information about the local area eg weather

I actually meant for output, but for input is good too.

> As im sure you already know Mono allows .Net to be run on most non Windows
> Machines the application its self was written in Ubuntu.
> But yes the system does need a web output.

Indeed, though I only seem to have about a 50/50 success rate getting
non-trivial .NET applications to run on Mono as they often do odd
Windows-specific not-pure-.NET things. (Don't ask me what those things are!)

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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