- HCalendar
hCalendar (short for "HTML iCalendar") is a Microformat standard for displaying a semantic (X)HTML representation of
iCalendar -formatcalendar information about an event, on web pages.It allows parsing tools (for example other websites, or
Firefox 's Operator extension) to extract the details of the event, and display them using some other website, index or search them, or to load them into a calendar or diary program, for instance. Multiple instances can be displayed as timelines.Example
Consider this semi-fictional example:
The English Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 with a party from 2-4pm at Jimmy Wales' house (more information).The HTML mark-up might be:
The English Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 with a party from 2-4pm at Jimmy Wales' house (more information)
We can add hCalendar mark-up using
span
HTML element s and the classesvevent
,summary
,dtstart
(start date),dtend
(end date),location
andurl
:The English Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 with a party from 2- 4pm at Jimmy Wales' house (more information)
Note the use of the
abbr
element to contain the machine readable,ISO8601 , date-time format for the start and end times.Exclusive end-dates
For whole-day dates, where no time is specified, the end-date must be recorded as "exclusive" (i.e. the day "after" the event ends). For example:
31 January 2001 Accessibility concerns
Concerns have been expressed [ [http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/ Web Standards Project, hAccessibility: Abbreviations in Microformats] ] that the use of the
abbr
element (using the so-called [http://microformats.org/wiki/abbr-design-pattern abbr-design-pattern] ) in the above manner causes accessibility problems, not least for users of screen readers and aural browsers. Work is underway to find an alternative method of presenting ISO8601 date-time information [ [http://microformats.org/wiki/assistive-technology Microformats Wiki: Assistive Technology] ] . This is particularly problematic for exclusive end-dates (see above example).Geo
The Geo microformat is a part of the hCalendar specification, and is often used to include the coordinates of the event's location within an hCalendar.
Attributes
For a full list of attributes, see the [http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-cheatsheet hCalendar cheat-sheet] .
Users
Notable organisations and other websites using hCalendar include:
*Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony Hall
*Google (in Google maps)
*The Opera web browser website [http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/microformats-on-opera-sites]
*TheRadio Times
*TheUniversity of Bath
*TheUniversity of Washington
*Upcoming.org
*Wikipedia
*Yahoo!, on Yahoo! LocalReferences
External links
* [http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar hCalendar at the Microformats Wiki]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.