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Comment by cliffwarden | Hacker News Reader

Very polished, I'm impressed! It seems like everyone ends up recreating a PM or todo tool at some point. It makes me wonder if there could be a world where we have a standard protocol/api and then anyone can bring their own preferred interface?

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For todos you could just use an iCalendar file full of VTODOs [1]. It's a shame that the iCalendar standard is poorly and incompletely implemented even in calendar programs and almost always missing from organizer programs that are basically todo lists.

[1] https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-2-to-do-compone...

In reality this looks far too basic to actually be a todo spec for a reasonable productivity app.

ie basic functionality I personally look for that I don’t think this would support would include:

* Projects with hierarchies

* Reminder dates

* Tags and contexts

* Multi-Step tasks

Hierarchcies are handled by 3.2.15 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545), and I suspect that could be leveraged to handle multi-step tasks; reminder dates are handled by VALARM in 3.6.6 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.6.6). Tags could be stored in comment properties (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.1....), but there's probably a better way already in the spec, which also includes support for extension by adding non-standard properties (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.8....).

Fair enough - I stand corrected! It does look like that could probably handle those things.

I think that world is coming. The representation of tasks, dependencies, hierarchies, calendars, and collaborations should be relatively universal.

If there is a popular standard, it will remain popular. The trick is building up enough users that they begin to credibly demand an export to the protocol from big players like Atlassian.

One of the big problems here is that there's no agreed upon mental model for how people think about the pieces fitting together (and I don't think that we could come up with one that would work for everyone).

Even if people do have the same model then the terms are often different, depending on how you learned to do things. (Example: What is the "correct" number of levels of tasks -> subtasks and what should each layer be called, i.e "Epics -> Stories -> Tasks")

We've been building out Shortcut (https://shortcut.com/) for several years now it's not uncommon for new leadership (new VP of Eng or VP of Product) to show up in a large organization (100+ people in eng and product) and decide that whatever problems the org is having can be solved by moving to Jira and forcing everyone into a new mental model around how they're building things.

(Side note: We're tracking the rate of success of people who make this decision and how long they last in the org, and it's [perhaps unsurprisingly] not great.)

I feel it would be like SQL with multiple dialects. Some small set would be interoperable, but eventually things end up diverging.

Note taking has this behavior, see Obsidian, Roam, Notion etc and markup import/export. It sort of works but not really.

We need ANSI pomodoros clearly :)

That would imply that the data model and semantics are the same, but they usually aren’t.

CSV

Markdown in git

> if there could be a world where we have a standard...

Probably not.

That's the great thing about standards, there's so many to choose from!

Then it would be awesome :)

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