Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

ericlathrop.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 21 posts

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#5

Post by jayknight »

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

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#6

Post by captn3m0 »

aantix wrote: post #2

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/

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#7

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

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?

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#8

Post by croisillon »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

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…

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

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#9

Post by captn3m0 »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Post reply on HN