Subject: [calsify] Wish for RSCALE draft adoption

From: Gregory Yakushev <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 09:16:11 +0000

Hello everybody!

A few words on why I think RSCALE (
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-icalendar-rscale) draft is important
to adopt as soon as possible.

For most of us in the Western World, the Gregorian calendar is the only
system we use, and its easy to assume the same for everybody else. But for
most people in the world this is not actually true: there are various
Islamic, Chinese, Korean, Hindu, Jewish calendaring systems that people use
for various purposes. In some countries one of these is the only official
calendar. Most people getting online in the next few years, billions of
them, will need some non-Gregorian calendar for their daily life.

Most of the issues with non-Gregorian calendars can be solved client-side.
Clients can show same event in any grid, and show dates in any system. But
this approach fails for recurring events: something that happens every
Islamic month or every Chinese year, birthdays or anniversaries for
example. RSCALE draft adds necessary iCalendar functionality to address
this need.

The draft was extensively discussed both at CalConnect and on this list. It
was first put for discussion here more than a year ago. At this point we
have at least 3 known implementations, including my implementation for
Google Calendar.

I believe it is important to make progress here, because lack of recognized
standard in this area leads to every vendor creating their own extensions
that nobody else understands. Thus breaking interoperability and damaging
the ecosystem. Already we see some API clients trying to put RRULEs with
X-LUNARYEAR=TRUE parameter into our system, which we fail to parse. As more
people get online in China, India and other countries this problem will
only get worse.

Hoping for speedy adoption of the RSCALE draft,
Grisha (@Google)