RFC 2445 compliance of org mode (was: Re: R: Problems with iCalendar export of my Calendar)

From: "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve@fsfeurope.org>
To: Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: RFC 2445 compliance of org mode (was: Re: R: Problems with iCalendar export of my Calendar)
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:44:29 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87bpwkvqqa.fsf_-_@katana.lair> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87wsf9usm9.fsf@katana.lair> (Georg C. F. Greve's message of "Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:49:02 +0100")

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Hi Carsten,

I have played with things some more, and have now managed to restructure
my Calendar file in a way that it allows me to export to iCalendar in a
good and meaningful way.

Trying to import the results I noticed something that looks like an
error in the way Org Mode implements RFC2445 (iCalendar) [1]. Section
4.1.1 says that the COMMA character is a special character similar to
SEMICOLON and COLON.

Whenever these characters are used in the value of any property, the
character MUST be placed in quoted text. Section 4.2 says that

   Property parameter values that contain the COLON (US-ASCII decimal
   58), SEMICOLON (US-ASCII decimal 59) or COMMA (US-ASCII decimal 44)
   character separators MUST be specified as quoted-string text values.
   Property parameter values MUST NOT contain the DOUBLE-QUOTE (US-ASCII
   decimal 22) character. The DOUBLE-QUOTE (US-ASCII decimal 22)
   character is used as a delimiter for parameter values that contain
   restricted characters or URI text.

This would appear to mean that

 a) Any use of " is illegal in iCalendar, and should be replaced by ''
    wherever that character occurs.

 b) All values that contain COLON, SEMICOLON or COMMA should be quoted
    inside DOUBLE-QUOTES

But Org Mode currently escapes the COMMA with a BACKSLASH, which is
understood by some, but not all applications. E.g. on my mobile phone,
the BACKSLASH is taken literal, so things look fairly ugly.

Regards,
Georg

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445/

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve@fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
President                                      +41 43 500 03 66 ext 400

Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)

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