RE: Alternative calendars and holidays, moon phases etc.

[ CC: list snipped - dunno about you, but my MTA can't do duplicate
  suppression on a Resent-Message-ID :-/ ]


On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Danny Ayers wrote:

> So let's say we have one virtual master clock that we all sync to by default
> (though we can dereference to a US Navy clock or a sundial if we so wish).
> How, at the most base level, do our applications interact with this - first
> things that spring to mind are polls as one option, events another : do we
> look at the church clock or listen for the bells? (must have been all that
> talk of religion...) are there other alternatives?

I can't answer that question directly. Might be worthwhile taking a step
back and asking "what do we want from calendaring?"

My focus is really on multi-party scheduling, but it's clear that
different people want different things from their application.

I guess what we're** looking for is a common data model for handling
calendarable events (I'm not insisting that every app uses it, just that
a lingua franca exists - to keep the burden of interoperability at a
linear cost). In other words, what does this "shared"* view of events
look like? What commonalities are out there? What's missing from what's
out there? In terms of interoperating parties, who pays the cost for a
piece of functionality, and what are the limits on that cost?

As to application behaviour, heaven forfend that we try to mandate how
these work - that's a persuit on a hiding to nothing. But getting a good
picture of what people want out of these things is a good place to
start. Libby's got some example scenarios - it'd probably be worth
having a look and seeing if you like what's there, or if there are
glaringly obvious things missing.

Erm, digging for a URL...

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/02/calendar/

jan "overly idiomatic" grant

* For varying values of "shared", it's clear.
** me anyway.

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
Whose kung-fu is the best?

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2001 12:39:56 UTC