If you do have good enough tools to provide the data in a more structured way then by all means do it, more elegant, easier to consume, more meaningful, less ambiguous, easier to grok, etc.

mod_event is much more useful then hCalendar in the context of feeds, but perhaps its non-obvious because you’re thinking of it from the context of S-to-P (site to person) syndication, but where it comes in very useful is S-to-S (site to site) syndication, the original RSS design goal.

additionally the joy of XML means you can mix in other namespaces to enrich mod_event’s intentionally limited expressiveness. in particular we’ve played with mixing in vCard and geo namespaces to get more specific

as for your last question, i’ve seen several hundred feeds with mod_event, but i’m kind of odd like that :)

It depends on your target market, of course… if nobody will ever scrape your site but you have an aggregator of calendar events watching your feed like a hawk, then the feed is most important.

But if you’re just kicking off a new market, you might as well do it in a way that makes the most sense for the future…which is what this seems to be.

Does one have to request permission from the envelope makers before one writes a letter in a different way?

Does it make sense to ask everyone to write envelopes differently just because you’ve figured out a new way to write letters or new things to put in your letters?

Does it make sense to feel obligated to duplicate the information in your letter on the envelope as well?

Of course not.

In many ways, feeds are nothing more than another medium for passing messages, and just as there was no need to change nor extend TCP/IP to handle HTTP or HTML for that matter, there is no need to change RSS/Atom to handle new types of content which are well described by portable microformats.

Tantek

P.S. I can’t believe anyone used the word “joy” and “namespaces” in the same sentence (other than to make that observation). :)