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It is also a data model that amounts to a de facto standard across all real calendaring apps. The text serialization sure is ugly and who would want to touch it unless they had to, but that's just a parsing problem. The wiki page shows 14 component types, who is ever going to think of that many when designing a replacement schema? Why not just use the data model you already have 'for free'

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A defacto standard for interchange ("feeds" announcing changes to activities), not for a database (remembering a large set of activities indefinitely).

The appropriate schemas are vastly different: a message like iCalendar should be simple and self-contained (leaving cleverness to the applications exchanging it), while a database like the article discusses should be normalized (nontrivial structures and queries aren't a problem).

It's a data model for an early-mid 1990s calendaring app (Lotus Organizer / Microsoft Schedule+).

If that works for you, go for it.

But what is the exact criticism here, e.g the serialized form doesn't look "nice" when you open the file?

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