> you can tell it was designed before XML/JSON were "hot
or you can tell it was designed by people who care more about performance.
or you can tell it was designed by people who care more about performance.
> or you can tell it was designed by people who care more about performance.
I doubt parsing iCal is significantly more performant than JSON for most use cases. In fact I can image it being less so in more cases than it is more so, and as close to the same as makes no odds in the vast majority of cases.
While it is true that dealing with json by hand is going to be more work than just importing an iCal library, I'm comparing apples to apples and suggesting dealing with json "by hand" is no more faff than dealing with iCal "by hand", and that dealing with either via a good library equally gives no benefit to iCal.
iCalendar is based on vCalendar, http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcal-10.txt - need to go to archive.org to see it, which shows Sept 1996.
from wikipedia, XML is listed as first published in Feb 1998, JSON is early 2000s.
edit: XML'd iCalendar, 2011 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6321
JSON'd iCalendar, 2014 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7265