Judging from my web logs, and the referers I’m getting from Google, people are very interested in the much discussed ability for iCal to publish to any WebDAV enabled webserver, not just to the $100/year .Mac service.

Well I’ll be honest, I haven’t gotten Jaguar working on my brother’s Mac yet, and therefore haven’t played with iCal.app, but I’ll clarify to the best of my understanding.

Apples and Oranges

When you talk about publishing to the web with iCal there are 2 distinct meanings for that word.

The first, and more intuitive meaning, is the ability to publish in some way that other people will be able to view that information with a web browser. An example of this is AaronSW’s Travel Calendar. That view web page you are seeing however is a WebObjectsapplication, and as far as I’ve been able to discover, a closed source one available only as part of the .Mac service.

The Post-Web World

The second meaning, and what is actually available to you without having a .Mac account, is the ability to upload an .ics file. An .ics file is a text file full of iCalendar information. While viewable in your web browser is about as interesting as only seeing the source of webpages without browser rendering it for you. The way to use this file is to subscribe to it from within your iCal application. Apple has some example .ics files already available full of major holidays, Bruce Springsteen concerts, and the like.

This is what is meant when they say you can publish from iCal to your own, WebDAV enabled webserver. In fact, you could do this process manually by exporting your events, and FTPing then up to a public directory somewhere on your website. You would lose the automated synchronization, but its an option for those without the option of WebDAV.

Desktop aggregators, desktop interfaces to CMSes, and now desktop applications communicating among themselves via the web. It wasn’t what I thought Apple meant when they said I could publish to my own server, but I don’t know that not conforming to my personal expectations makes it less cool.

Btw., storing calendar information on a remote server via HTTP or FTP is also supported by the Mozilla Calendar, and they didn’t create a new URI scheme. Still nothing beats PandoCalendar, even if its prayerware.

And if digging through Apple’s Admin’s Guide to OS X is not your cup of tea, a short and sweet intro to enabling WebDAV on your local web server.