Subject: RE: calendar file for IETF

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:41:43 -0400

Just for fun, you could try http://rtg.ietf.org/~fenner/ietf/ietf-63.ics ;
this is a completely independent implementation of the same mapping so
may have a completely different failure mode ;-)

  Bill

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From: Elwyn Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:06:58 +0100

It reads in to Thunderbird OK, but the result is less pretty than 
Eliot's effort.  Eliot's version appears to lay out the multiple events 
in a partcular timeslot evenly across the available space, whereas 
Bill's results in different sized blocks and in some cases some of the 
events appear to be hiding others.

Looking at the .ics sources it is not obvious why this should be.

Clearly Bill's has additional useul info... need a merge of the two!

Regards,
Elwyn

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From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:35:37 -0400

Hi Elwyn,

--On July 27, 2005 12:06:58 AM +0100 Elwyn Davies <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> It reads in to Thunderbird OK, but the result is less pretty than Eliot's
> effort.  Eliot's version appears to lay out the multiple events in a
> partcular timeslot evenly across the available space, whereas Bill's
> results in different sized blocks and in some cases some of the events
> appear to be hiding others.
>

One important (IMHO) issue is that Bill's ics does not use timezone info 
for the times. Since I'm not going to be in Paris, but do want to listen in 
to some sessions, having proper timezone info in the ics would allow me to 
see the times adjusted to my own local timezone without having to do any 
math in my head!

Couple of other points:

- Some lines were longer than 72 characters
- Some SUMMARY's contained raw HTMl mark-up

However, it imported fine into my client.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

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From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:23:30 -0400

>for the times.

This was a conscious decision.  I think the obvious answer is to have
two versions, one with timezone and one without.

>- Some lines were longer than 72 characters

Erk, I forgot about that aspect.

>- Some SUMMARY's contained raw HTMl mark-up

This was an oversight when converting the HTML output to iCalendar output.

  Bill

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From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:31:28 -0400

>events appear to be hiding others.

This may be because mine treats two sequential 1-hour meetings as a
2-hour meeting, and Eliot's treats them as 2 1-hour meetings.  See
l3vpn on Monday and mip6 on Tuesday evening.  I originally wrote the
agenda parser that's the basis of this .ics output when we switched
to 1-hour meetings on Tuesdays because I could never tell whether
a given meeting was one or 2 hours long.

I have yet to find a client that has a good variable-length overlapping
event rendering algorithm, especially with 8-9 events in the overlap.
Apple's iCal usually does really well when there are 3 or 4.

  Bill

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 08:04:17 +0200

Bill,

I couldn't agree with you more regarding multiple overlapping events.
They're all designed for the case where one might double-book, and even
on occasion triple book, but 8 or 9 events?  None of them deal with that
correctly.   I could go on and on about what these Calendar programs
don't do, but as I'm not going to fix them...

Eliot

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 10:04:23 +0200

> two versions, one with timezone and one without.

Why would you want to have a calender without timezones??

(Unless the IETF holds all its meetings in my timezone, like this  
one. But I don't see that happening.)

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From: Elwyn Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:11:56 +0100

Absolutely... Be that as it may, I was intrigued as to why Thunderbird 
did such a different job on the two files.  A quick look at the code did 
not help.

Anyway thanks for the effort.. very useful!

Regards,
Elwyn

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From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 11:43:32 -0400

>Why would you want to have a calender without timezones??

Mostly for clients with bad user interfaces - e.g., old Apple iCal
which didn't let you set the display time zone differently from
the system time zone, or web-based calendar servers that don't allow
the visitor to set the display time zone.

  Bill

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From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:59:29 -0400

Hi Eliot,

> don't do, but as I'm not going to fix them...

Actually, the client I'm working on does do a pretty good job of laying out 
the events in IETF meetings. The reason for that is that I actually used 
the IETF meeting schedule as an example of a complex schedule that had to 
be displayed properly, and designed the system so that the IETF meetings 
look nice when displayed. The algorithm for doing that was of course 
designed to be generic enough to handle other complex schedules too.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

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From: "Marshall Eubanks" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 13:16:07 -0400

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:41:43 -0400
> may have a completely different failure mode ;-)

This works like a charm on iCal on OS X 10.3.9. 

Thanks
Marshall