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RSS And Calendar Integration
sytelus writes "Many has played with the idea of packaging calendar information in to the RSS feed. Almost every other website owned by some kind of group or organization has an event calendar so the thought of aggregating those events in to your calendar is pretty appealing. Even more appealing is the thought that people might start tagging their weekend plans and schedules in their RSS feeds. This essay , written after digging through dozens of W3C specs and half a dozen of implementations, reviews the current state of affair."
Works for me.... Does everything *have* to be XML??!??
what's wrong with iCal, aka vcal 2.0? There's even an XML version, and it can definitely be syndicated better than RSS.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Even more appealing is the thought that people might start tagging their weekend plans and schedules in their RSS feeds.
And why would that be?
What would that be good for?
And besides that, even if most sites offer RSS feeds today, how many people are really reading them?
Maybe it sounds stupid to mention that on slashdot, but I know a lot of people, who don't even have the slightest clue what RSS is in the first place.
Actually, in my haste to post and measure my geekdick, I didn't stop to think. He's right... an XML based calendar (not RSS... why does it have to be labeled 'rss'?? its XML!!) standard would be better because most languages have XML parsers built in, and therefore the application following would increase. I still can't find a good iCal aggregator or application. (Yes, I know about sunbird but flat out, posting a calendar does not work.)
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
One of his main points is that one thing RSS does well is provide a good subscription method. IE a well defined standard on, "go here to get an updated version of this calendar". Sounds like he is proposing using RSS with an iCal payload. The idea is to leverage existing support of the iCal into a subscription model.
Spencer Ogden
...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar has some merit being XHTML compatible and can be nicely embedded in any XHTML (or even HTML) page. Distribution of calendar files (.ics) isn't the problem. The real problem is that it's hard to discuss events outside .ics format so that applications are still able to automatically extract the information. hCalendar is nicely submerged inside the real content as demonstrated by the example. Throw in hCard and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
What I'd like to do is introduce a distributed events system, so that information on an event could be submitted at one site and it could propagate around the network keeping all the listings up to date.
Requirements for the system are simplicity. i.e. setting up a node should be very easy (most groups are not very computer literate) so recommendations for easy to install software would be good. The software would need to integrate easily with existing websites, so nice configurable php scripts would be good. Maybe a bit richer format than iCal so its easy to search for events in England or a particular county and also some tagging features to allow for certain types of events.
I'd also like to do something similar for links to websites.
Any suggestions?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
iCal already has a good subscription method. You subscribe to the iCal calendar over HTTP.
TFA is about how we need to reinvent iCal because it's not in XML. Uh, right.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak