Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds | Hacker News Reader

Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

ericlathrop.com

57 pointsericlathrop19 comments

Another approach would be for better support of microfomats like h-event[1]. There is a link on that page to project to convert h-event markup into an ics file, but it isn't a mature solution. But imagine being able to just add a URL to a web page that lists events and your calendar would be able to extract the event information from the html itself.

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event

Because of the inconsistency of the generated html among different site, I think it would be difficult to do. But I love your idea. I think something along the lines of an rss feed generated from an ics file that lists the events to come, or something like that. Something more in the way the subscriber subscribes to the "events feed", rather than being spammed with emails about events to come, for each event. But maybe I'm wrong and this is not sustainable or useful in any way.

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet?

I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in.

Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars.

I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events next to their private events and appointments.

This might be even more frustrating for users who might not be very tech-savvy enough to properly manage their calendars. Or even have to work with calendars that don't offer enough tools for proper separation of concerns.

Am I overthinking it?

not overthinking, it's a very good argument, i guess it will depend on a lot of things but both options have their plus and minus

Definitely overthinking. I personally like having the ability to see "events I'd like to attend" in my calendar. Users who don't like this can decide not to subscribe, or use an alternative calendar app, or learn how to hide/show specific calendars in their existing app.

If you have too many events, than probably creating separate webcal feeds for categories makes sense.

There's even sites that do the opposite - instead of providing a static ICS file for a "single event", they'll provide a webcal feed so that they "update the event" OTA in case anything changes. That is quite annoying tbh.

Calendar subscriptions get put into a different name category. You can hide them or give them a low contrast color. I use it for sporting events and trash collection. I would love it if more companies and services exposed their events as a calendar feed.

It wouldn't be random, but user selected. I have imported calendars for church, daughter's soccer team, some clubs and hobby events, etc.

Some of them I leave disabled unless/until I want to check them specifically, but it's nice to have them right in my calendar instead of having to go to the right page or app to see different schedules.

In addition to what sibling comments have said, and I know this is a waning concern these days, but having the events in iCal also affords offline use.

I certainly wish it wasn't a waning concern.

If you want to be future proof, also publish calendars as JSCalendar https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8984

Having been reading up on calendars recently I have to say I prefer the iCal format to this.

This is worth proposing in the HTML Standard - 4.6.7.1[0] covers link rel=alternate with RSS feeds, so fits perfectly there.

[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#rel-alternate

When I saw "iCalendar" I assumed this was a format (and possibly old article) related to Apple's "iCal"--but turns out it's a standard from the IETF in 1998

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar

I remember reading that Aaron Schwartz was about to pursue solving internet calendars, but that he never got to it.

Imagine we would have had something like RSS for events with Feedly-like services to help us filter out the relevant parts in 2008… I would have travelled the world for concerts

Seems like a nice weekend project.

Have the user auth with their google business/teams/Apple account - sync the calendar, make the calendar available via rss.

> make the calendar available via rss.

I've thought a lot about ICS/RSS combinations[0], and my current stance is that while they achieve similar things in some cases, RSS is meant for things that happened in the past (items in the future may or may not show in your client), and calendars are meant for future events. This incompatibility makes it hard to do RSS feeds for events, unless you use event-publication-date, which has its own issues.

I've instead been working on custom calendars for sites I care about.[1] is one such attempt from someone else, but I've been focusing on simpler options[2]

There's also the problem that both Android and Windows are horrible with webcal (iOS/MacOS/Linux work decently well), making "subscribable web calendars" out of reach of most Android users, unless the understand the terrible UX that these platforms offer.

[0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/1351

[1]: https://github.com/simon816/ical-bridge

[2]: https://captnemo.in/blr-habba/

RSS is just XML, so in theory you can extend it as much as you want, including all the necessary extra bits of info for future events.

The problem, of course, is that most RSS-consuming tools don't recognise custom namespaces. Still, if you're targeting people who will write their own feed-parsing tools, it can probably work fine.

https://calconnect.org

Please supply this feedback and participate.

Seems like a good idea, to me.

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