What is a webcal protocol?

Question

Recently i was trying to export my friends' birthday's list from facebook, where i was provided a url like-

webcal://www.facebook.com/ical/b.php?uid=14422701&key=42c5e45fasd

I wonder, what is this webcal:// protocol? can anyone help me please? I tried googling but didnt reach an easy to understand solution.

Answer 1

Webcal was initiated for use with the Apple iCal application and has become a common de facto standard for accessing iCalendar formatted files via WebDAV.[citation needed] It is not an official URI scheme, such as http: and ftp:, as registered with IANA. The Webcal protocol prefix is used to trigger an external protocol handler which is passed the URL of the .ics file rather than being passed the downloaded contents of the file, in much the same way feed: is sometimes used to trigger external RSS readers. The idea is that with this protocol prefix the target file should be subscribed to rather than imported into the calendar application as would happen with a simple download.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcal