ICalendar - Limitations and Future

Limitations and Future

The iCalendar format is designed to transmit calendar-based data, such as events, and intentionally does not describe what to do with that data. Thus, other programming may be needed to negotiate what to do with this data.

iCalendar is meant to "provide the definition of a common format for openly exchanging calendaring and scheduling information across the Internet". While the features most often used by users are widely supported by iCalendar, some more advanced capabilities have problems. For example, most vendors do not support Journals (VJOURNAL). "ecurring and repeating meetings still have a bit of mystery and ambiguity associated with them. Resulting in no true interoperability between the current calendaring and scheduling vendors." VTODOs have had conversion problems as well.

iCalendar's calendar is also not compatible with some non-Gregorian calendars such as the lunar calendars used in Israel or Saudi Arabia.

The memo "Calendar Access Protocol" (RFC 4324) was an initial attempt at a universal system to create real-time calendars. This protocol was eventually abandoned, possibly because of excessive complexity. Regardless, iCalendar-based code such as GroupDAV and CalDAV are now being used more frequently in both client and server software packages.

The IETF "Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group" (ietf-calsify WG) has published additional proposed revisions to the iCalendar standards (as RFC-drafts/"Proposed"; see ), but as of January 2011, the group has 'ended'. Much of their work focused on clarifications to the previous standards, and was apparently influenced on work by the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (a.k.a. Calconnect)