[uf-discuss] all day events

Thu Feb 16 03:45:50 PST 2006

> You're right there is a date type, but we ignore it for good reason.
> Sorry that I took me awhile to respond, but I couldn't remember at
> first the exact reason for the way we do it.

Hey, not a problem.
> Anyway, the reason we confound the DATE and DATETIME types is that
> they are treated essentially the same by calendaring applications.
> For example, I just created an event in Apple's iCal.app for 2/6-2/9
> (last week), then exported it:

> > BEGIN:VCALENDAR
> > VERSION:2.0
> > X-WR-CALNAME:blah
> > PRODID:-//Apple Computer,円 Inc//iCal 2.0//EN
> > X-WR-RELCALID:4BA2A3D9-23D1-495E-BFA2-AA439939BF0C
> > X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles
> > CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
> > METHOD:PUBLISH
> > BEGIN:VEVENT
> > DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20060206
> > DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20060209
> > SUMMARY:blah
> > UID:26F9A96A-5D25-455A-8240-12EED1ADF63C
> > SEQUENCE:4
> > DTSTAMP:20060214T070829Z
> > END:VEVENT
> > END:VCALENDAR
>> Notice that, though I created the event as ending on 2006年02月08日, it
> put 2006年02月09日, making 2006年02月09日 == 2006年02月09日T00:00.

I'm not really clear on the argument you are making here. I see two
issues with your statement (a - that calendaring programs like the
Apple one do understand both dates and datetimes; and b - that you've
said the end date is both the 8th and the 9th in your example (and I
do understand the idea that end dates are exclusive)) - but this isn't
really what I was trying to convey.
Let me try to restate the issue again in a different way, maybe it
will clear things up.
I reckon:
- 2006年02月09日 is a date
- 2006年02月09日T00:00 is a 'floating' datetime
- semantically (sorry, I don't like that word) 2006年02月09日 == 2006年02月09日T00:00
- but 2006年02月09日T00:00 is the ugly way of saying 2006年02月09日
- the hcard-parsing page says "For properties which take an ISO8601
datetime value, parsers *should* pad any necessary precision (e.g.
seconds) and *should* normalize any datetimes with timezone offsets"
- since there is no timezone, none should be present in the final date
(or datetime)
therefore the proper way to write 2006年02月09日 is 2006年02月09日T00:00:00.
In my blog entry I was asserting that is was neater to write the
datetime simply as a date - that was a big portion of my blog entry -
perhaps not as clearly expressed as it should have been. Again, I
just think 2006年02月09日 is neater.
For the sake of all of those concerned (who have even bothered to read
this far) that we agree on, as you said earlier, that (drumroll
please)
---> 2006年02月09日 == 2006年02月09日T00:00:00
Therefore it would be nice to add clarification to the hcard-parsing spec saying
- all dates information should be expressed as datetimes
- 'all day events' *may* be represented without a timezone, if they
are a floating time (as described in rfc2445), but *should* have the
hour, minute and second represented as 00:00:00
Phew.
Mark
> -ryan
> --
> Ryan King
> ryan at technorati.com
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