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RSS And Calendar Integration 29

Posted by Hemos from the trying-to-make-it-work dept.
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."
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RSS And Calendar Integration More

RSS And Calendar Integration

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  • ... it's called iCal [google.com], and it's already here.

    • Re:Umm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by xENoLocO ( 773565 )
      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.)

      • Re:Umm (Score:4, Insightful)

        by spencerogden ( 49254 ) <spencer@spencerogden.com> on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @09:56PM (#12630086) Homepage
        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.

        • Re:Umm (Score:3, Insightful)

          by metamatic ( 202216 )
          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.
      • XML is last year's Really Cool Buzzword. 2005 is the Year of RSS.
    • You offer no help to answer the submitter's question, and instead post a snide comment with a lame Googling attempt. At least you apologized.

      Not everything can be solved with a simple Google search.

      The irony with your shoot-from-the-hip post is that out of the top 20 Google results in your search, there is only one useful link (The IETF RFC site).

      The rest of the results deal with closed-source software products such as Apple's iCal or Brown Bear's iCal client, an iCal sharing service, or point to complet

  • What's Wrong with iCal? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by glamslam ( 535995 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @09:21PM (#12629872)
    Works for me.... Does everything *have* to be XML??!??

  • Uhh... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quinto2000 ( 211211 )
    what's wrong with iCal [ietf.org], aka vcal 2.0? There's even an XML version, and it can definitely be syndicated better than RSS.
    • Just caught this from the article:

      The only thing that is missing from ics file is that it does not tell me where I should go back and fetch the updates for new events. That's exactly what RSS is good at. The key is RSS Enclosure. If you are already uploading ics files, then all you need to do is create a log entry with the ics file in enclosure. It would all work out with minimal of change and training. People who are using non-aggregating calendar/scheduling programs can still use ics files directly. Th

      • Re:Uhh... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This person didn't do their research that well.

        On top of that, he doesn't know what he's talking about. For example, he says that "RDF is simply an XML language", when it's a data model that just happens to have an XML serialisation.

      • Re:Uhh... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The only thing that is missing from ics file is that it does not tell me where I should go back and fetch the updates for new events.

        Oh man, that's rich.

        "Help, I bough this delicious can of soup from Kroger, located on the corner of 5th and Main near my house, but it doesn't have instructions on where to buy another can! What do I do??"

      • Yes, you caught it right. This review was based on Mozilla Calendar (rather then Apple's iCal.app) which seems to support webcal but has no way to remove/view subscriptions. It also doesn't have anyway to control how often it polls. That also made me wonder if Mozilla Calendar treats "subscription" just as simple "import".
  • 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.
    • I think you're wrong, RSS is great, I love it and I use it and you probably use it, so who cares if most people don't know what it is? Does it make it less valuable? Inovation starts with one or a few people.
      • I think you're wrong, RSS is great, I love it and I use it and you probably use it, so who cares if most people don't know what it is? Does it make it less valuable? Inovation starts with one or a few people.

        You are right about how great it is and that innovation starts with one or a few people, but does this mean that RSS will be a success in the long run? Right now I'm not sure if it will become as successful as email or as successful as betamax and laserdisc.
        I guess in the end it will all depend on t
  • why are they intrested in rss ?
    because they want to subscribe to events...

    people create a ical file and stick it on webDAV that way you can tell if it has changed with a http method

    and yes you can use RDF but then half the readers (rss reader / ical from outlook) dont know about that and wont anytime soon (while all os's apple and MS can read webDAV )

    really what they need is a good ical client and hopefully thunderbird / sunbird can do this and accept meetings / book resources whatever...

    regards

    John Jo
    • Your right there. Sunbird Desperatly needs some work and hopefuly as it nears completion it will become a "usable" calendat and scheduling tool on par with the (as much as i hate to say this) "standard" thats set with Outlook. ( *shudder* )

      But one thing i have noticed. Is I as a person never go out of my way to schedule things. Yes i know its a bad habit blah blah etc. But its not that i realy Can Not Be Bothered stopping and spending the time to plan thing and so on. Its I dont think that way.

      One thing
  • It just sounds like another "project" that will be adopted by a computer science student, and duly abandoned after (s)he finishes final year and begins paid employment.

    If you really want to contribute, get involved in the calendar (iCal) working group in the IETF, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. At least then, when you stop having enough time to contribute, your effort and work won't be lost or just gather dust before becoming another abandoned project.

  • I think that iCal format is fine for sharing... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mr3038 ( 121693 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @01:59AM (#12631439)
    ...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar [technorati.com] 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 [technorati.com]. Throw in hCard [technorati.com] and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.
  • Allow me to introduce a problem I'd like to solve. I'm part of a large international permaculture movement many of the the different groups have their own websites with space for events. However there is no communication between the website so the task of actually finding an event is rather tricky involving searching of numerous websites.

    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 kee

  • FYI - I set up RSS Calendars a few weeks ago for SF Station http://www.sfstation.com/ [sfstation.com] -- a bit burried, if you drill down into Clubs, Music, City, or any of the Arts, you can get a listing of SF Station editorially picked events as RSS.

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