MadMode

A while back I wrote about using JSON and templates to produce microformat data. I swapped some of those ideas in today while trying to figure out a simple, consistent model for recurring events using floating times plus locations.

I spent a little time catching up on the IETF CALSIFY WG; they meet Wednesday, July 12 at 9am in Montreal. I wonder how much progress they'll make on issues like the March 2007 DST change and the CalConnect recommendations toward an IANA timezone registry.

When I realized I didn't have a clear problem or use case in mind, I went looking for something that I could chew on in test-driven style.

So I picked up the hcard tests and built a vcard-to-hcard converter sort of out of spare parts. icslex.py handles low-level lexical details of iCalendar, which turn out to have lots in common with vCard: line breaking, escaping, that sort of thing. On top of that, I wrote vcardin.py, which has enough vcard schema smarts to break down the structured N and ADR and GEO properties so there's no microparsing below the JSON level. Then contacts.kid is a kid template that spits out the data following the hcard spec.

It works like this:

python vcardin.py contacts.kid hcard/01-tantek-basic.vcf >,01.html

Then I used X2V to convert the results back to .vcf format and compared them using hcard testing tools (normalize.pl and such) fixed the breakage. Lather, rinse, repeat... I have pretty much all the tests working except 16-honorific-additional-multiple.

It really is a pain to set up a loop for the additional-name field when that field is almost never used, let alone used with multiple values. This sort of structure is more natural in XML/XHTML/hCard than in JSON, in a way. And if I change the JSON structure from a string to a list, does that mean the RDF property should use a list/collection? Probably not... I probably don't need additional-name to be an owl:FunctionalProperty.

Hmm... meanwhile, this contacts.kid template should mesh nicely with my wikipedia airport scraping hack...

See also: IRC notes from #microformats, from #swig.