How is hCalendar different from xCalendar, i.e. iCalendar XML guidelines submitted as an IETF Internet-Draft?
• hCalendar and xCalendar are actually very similar in that they are both based on iCalendar standard, RFC2445. However, xCalendar is a way of representing iCalendar files using non-standard XML element names and attributes. This is inadequate and unwieldly for serving on web pages. xCalendar is still a separate, encapsulated document in the context of the web, that requires yet another namespace. Nobody would ever look at an xCalendar XML file in the context of their ordinary browsing, unless it’s XSLTed into something else, e.g. hCalendar. On the other hand, hCalendar is easily embeddable into normal XHTML web pages, easily stylable with CSS, cleanly separates human presentable date information vs. machine parsable ISO-8601 dates, etc. With hCalendar, calendar and events content appears both to the human user *and* to hCalendar-aware machine implementations, parsers, indexers, etc., on *today’s* web.
