DTSTARTVALUEDATE19970714

DTSTARTVALUEDATE19970714 is a stylized way to refer to a date-valued DTSTART property in iCalendar data, indicating a start date of July 14, 1997 for a calendar component such as VEVENT or VTODO. In standard iCalendar syntax, this concept is expressed with the canonical form DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:19970714. The compact label itself is not a valid ICS property, but it illustrates the idea of a date-only start value.

In iCalendar, the DTSTART property defines when an event or task starts. When the VALUE parameter is set to DATE, the value represents a calendar date without a time component, using the format YYYYMMDD. For example, 19970714 corresponds to July 14, 1997. Date values do not specify a time zone; they are treated as all-day dates.

All-day events are typically represented with a corresponding DTEND that marks the end of the day or event duration. For example, a single-day all-day event might have DTEND:19970715, since DTEND is non-inclusive and the event ends at the start of the following day.

Historically, the VALUE parameter and its use with DATE have been described in the iCalendar specifications (RFC 5545 and earlier RFC 2445). The standardized form is DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:19970714, and many calendar applications rely on this syntax to correctly interpret all-day events. When parsing or exchanging ICS data, it is important to use the explicit VALUE=DATE form to avoid ambiguity about whether the value represents a date or a date-time.