representing an event vs a calendar?

In the wake of Apple's iCal.app it is growing increasingly popular to
publish calendars as simple .ics files.  This means that most new
iCalendar aware applications seem to treat a file of type text/calendar as
a discrete calendar to be subscribed to (e.g. US Holidays) rather then a
single event to added to a calendar store.

I had a vague notion that it might be possible to address this using the
"component" piece of the mime type, but when I went back and looked at the
RFC this evening it didn't help after all.

I realize that there are mechanisms for how to handle this in the more
sophisticated (my understanding is that CalDAV proposes having each object
be its one file/resource), but I'm wondering how, now, with iCalendar
finally popular, does one go about representing just a single event.

The use case is an "Add this Event to my Calendar" link from a page of
public event listings.  Any insights would be great.

Thanks,
Kellan