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Ask HN: Why is there no RSS-equivalent for events?

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Ask HN: Why is there no RSS-equivalent for events?

#1

Post by nanna »

It seems obvious to me that something like RSS would make a great events publication format, and I'm wondering if anyone has already thought of this.

Say I would like to follow the events of my local art gallery and the local gigs of a certain musician. The gallery and musician could put out a feed which I could follow, with values including date-time, address, info-url, ticket-url, details. My event-feed reader would pull in the gallery's and musician's events from their website, and populate a calendar with them. Moreover, I could set the reader to only display events in the region I care about, so the only gigs of the musician that would appear would be the ones when they come to my town.

They seems a simple, decentralised way of following events, but I'm surprised nothing like this already exists?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no RSS-equivalent for events?

#2

Post by pimterry »

ical is effectively this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar.

Google Calendar for example will let you follow published external calendars by URL: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/settings/addbyurl.

So yes, the technology base exists. There's other active uses of it here and there, e.g. many services send event emails with ics files attached, containing a single-event calendar that some mail clients (including gmail) will show/import automatically.

To date it hasn't really become popular as an RSS-style tool though - from what I've seen it's largely used directly within your own calendar, rather than as a browseable list of upcoming events from many sources.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no RSS-equivalent for events?

#3

Post by nanna »

pimterry wrote: post #2

ical is effectively this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar . Google Calendar for example will let you follow published external calendars by URL: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/settings/addbyurl . So yes, the technology base exists. There's other active uses of it here and there, e.g. many services send event emails with ics files attached, containing a single-event calendar that some mail clients…

> Not to be confused with Apple's Calendar application (previously named iCal).

All these years I had exactly that confusion!

Thanks, really interesting.

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