The objections raised by Keith do not appear to me to fall under any of the requirements for MIME type registration set out in RFC 4288.
I disagree with the argument made in any case.
The iCalendar format represents a 1990s style approach to the problem. There is no real separation of syntax from the data model. Software developed in that manner is notoriously difficult to get right for the reasons that Keith describes.
XML is a substantial overhead if you are dealing with a single protocol but when you are dealing with multiple protocols the benefits are substantial and allow something like 70% of your coding effort to be pushed onto the platform layer. That means that you have 70% less new code and new code paths to contend with.
One of the discoveries of the mid 1990s was that yacc and LR(1) grammars are no more useful for describing computer languages than they are for describing natural languages. The most useful feature of a computer grammar is regularity and consistency. XML enforces a high degree of consistency.
Now I would quite prefer to take about 50% or more of the XML spec and discard it. They did a good job of taking out the most insane features of SGML but there is much more cruft that could be cut out. But that does not change the fact that using XML as is produces clearer specifications that are more likely to be implemented without errors than with the 1990s approach.
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