The IESG has approved the following document: - 'jCal: The JSON format for iCalendar' (draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal-10.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the JSON data formats for vCard and iCalendar Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Pete Resnick and Barry Leiba. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal/ Technical Summary This document defines an alternative representation for iCalendar data (RFC 5545), structured using the JSON data interchange format (RFC 4627). Defining this "jCal" representation for iCalendar allows easier integration of such data with web or other Javascript-based applications, and other JSON-based protocols being developed within the IETF. Because jCal is amenable to multiple technical implementations and interoperability testing, the document is Standards Track. Working Group Summary There was no special controversy about this specification within the JCARDCAL WG, and in the shepherd's opinion both jCard and jCal are rather straightforward alternative representations of existing data models. The two main points of focus in this work have been ensuring that the JSON representations use JSON in appropriate ways and are consistent with the existing textual and XML representations. Much attention has been paid to these issues within the JCARDCAL WG, and the shepherd is satisfied that these considerations have been addressed in draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal-08. Document Quality The document emerged from discussion within the XML-JSON technical committee of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, where it experienced early review from at least three participants in that forum. Upon adoption by the JCARDCAL WG, another half a dozen individuals reviewed and commented on the specification. Although it might appear that the document has not received "wide" review, the population of implementers interested in the topic is relatively small (only ~50 people are subscribed to the JCARDCAL WG discussion list). In addition, the jCal specification was preceded into WG Last Call, IETF Last Call, and IESG review by "jCard", a sister specification defining the JSON representation of vCard data. As a result, many issues surrounding jCal were first ironed out through work on jCard (e.g., handling of unknown structured values), thus leading to fewer open issues related to jCal specifically. The calendaring and scheduling community is very interested in this specification, there are several implementations, and there is good consensus to advance the specification to Proposed Standard. All three of the authors have confirmed that they do not have direct, personal knowledge of any IPR related to this document. There are no IPR disclosures related to this document. According to the IDnits tool, there are no downward references. This document adds one entry to the iCalendar Data Types registry (parallel to the "UNKNOWN" entry already added to the vCard Value Data Types registry) and also registers a new media type "calendar+json". Review of the media type registration was requested on the media-types list on January 6, 2014: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/media-types/current/msg00563.html Personnel The shepherd for this document is Peter Saint-Andre. The responsible Area Director is Pete Resnick.
