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.<p>[1] <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event" rel="nofollow">http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event</a>
Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet?<p>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.<p>Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Am I overthinking it?
If you want to be future proof, also publish calendars as JSCalendar <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8984" rel="nofollow">https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8984</a>
This is worth proposing in the HTML Standard - 4.6.7.1[0] covers link rel=alternate with RSS feeds, so fits perfectly there.<p>[0]: <a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#rel-alternate" rel="nofollow">https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#rel-alternate</a>
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<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar</a>
I remember reading that Aaron Schwartz was about to pursue solving internet calendars, but that he never got to it.<p>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.<p>Have the user auth with their google business/teams/Apple account - sync the calendar, make the calendar available via rss.