What's the difference between Webcal and WebDAV/CalDAV?

Question

As I understand it, CalDAV is an extension to WebDAV to manage iCalendar subscriptions.

And Webcal is a URL scheme that does the same thing, but not standarized.

Answer 1

All what Julian said, but presumably the real question is about the difference between plain iCalendar-over-HTTP (commonly called webcal, 'iCalendar subscription' or 'subscribed calendar') and CalDAV. Or in other words: what does CalDAV add.

Simply put: in iCoHTTP you usually store a whole calendar under one URL, like 'http://yahoo.com/sports/nba/schedule-2015.ics' (or webcal:). This URL represents a full calendar and is almost always readonly (you can't do a PUT to this URL). Why is that? Because to add/change/delete a single event in such a calendar, you would need to re-transfer the full calendar.

In CalDAV a calendar is a WebDAV collection, there is one URL which represents the calendar, e.g.: 'http://icloud.com/calendars/joe/home/' and then you have one child URL for each event. Like 'http://icloud.com/calendars/joe/home/buy-beer.ics', 'http://icloud.com/calendars/joe/home/family-meeting.ics' and so on. You can then just DELETE, PUT etc individual items of such a collection.

In summary: If you simply want to publish a calendar which rarely changes and is managed by other means (like a CMS), you can use iCal-over-HTTP. If you want to provide a calendar which the user (or maybe a group of people) can change from within their calendar client, you want to use CalDAV.

CalDAV also has a set of extensions, e.g. many CalDAV server can automatically perform scheduling operations for you (setting up meetings and such). There is an extension to share calendars with other people, and so on.

P.S.: This is a bit confusing, but yes, Apple also has a way of using WebDAV to manage iCalendar subscriptions. But this is yet another thing which works alongside CalDAV.