The problems I see related to specifying event locations (what city an event is in) and categories (such as music genres, etc) in calendar data for public syndication/aggregation/sharing is in the lack of ways to specify things like cities/countries and categories in existing calendar software.
> > There seems to be a need to distinguish between types of events, not > > only in the area of CFPs. Is there a way to categorize hEvents or > > other microformats? Both hCalendar and iCal specs seem to allow for categories, but iCal seems to lack any structured way to specify a city or country for an event. This seems to be solved in hCalendar by combining it with hCard/adr ... ... but in existing software based around iCal there are no good ways to enter such data. Is there any pc desktop calendar app that can do this kind of thing yet? I'm looking for software to recommend to event promoters who wish to provide feeds of their (public) events. (so that they can get listings sites like spraci.com to automatically update listings from their feeds - for this kind of use it would be important to be able to specify a city or country in a machine-readable way) I think a list of tags for categories (such as the type of event, styles of music, etc) would be much better than the rather limited predefined categories I see in software such as iCal, Sunbird, Outlook, etc (which I find pretty useless - some software does let you add custom categories but the hassle of having to pre-define a long list of custom categories just for it to be able to even see the categories in imported data is more hassle than I think most people are likely to be bothered with) Cites and countries would need to be entered in a stuctured way if they want to create a public machine-readable feed of events in their calendar .. maybe by choosing from a list (probably with a default the user can set if all their events are in the same city)... ...it needs to be easy for the user if we want people to use it! (specifying a city shouldn't rely too much on geo/lat/long either - how many people know the coordinates of the locations of their events or can be bothered spending the time to look them up when they are entering an event for publication... but I think we can usually say that they will at least know what country their event will take place in!) - Perhaps what is needed is a standard list of place names for cities/states/countries so people can simply choose a city from a list. (even if for iCal sharing a workaround might be needed such as appending to the categories or something like that - if the names are from a standard list of place names unlikely to be used for any other purpose then perhaps the software can still work out what they are) I know such a list of standard place names would be a big but some way to do this is needed! The people who are likely to publish and share their calendars publically (likely people to be using hCalendar or iCal formats) are likely to want to be able to add or use standard cities/countries and tag-like categories and if the software doesn't provide an easy way to do it such information usually either ends up as part of unstructured text in the description, location or summary fields or being ommitted (making it hard or messy to use their feed for a lot of likely uses) _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
