Monday, January 10, 2005

ESF - the Nonexistent Format? ESF seems to have fallen off the radar. Or has it? The real question is, has it been adopted? And the next question is, what ESF clients/tools exist? There was some discussion by Jeff Julian and John Bristowe of a NewsGator extension, but it seems to be MIA. Then there is another XML format of unknown weight--the RDF Schedule format. My goal is to integrate syndicated event information into Microsoft Outlook. Is there an existing way to do this? There is the vCal format for sharing appointments, and its cousin, iCal. But these solutions all involve a multi-step pull operation via email. This is where RSS excels. You don't have to sign up on an email list. No spam! ESF gets a few hits on Google (around 67,000 as of today). I still need to research more to find tools for ESF. But if ESF is as obscure as some reports, maybe ESF is not right for the job. Is anybody still working on it? Here are the sponsors of the standard: Jeff Julian Devin Rader Kirk Allen Evans Steven Smith We'll see. I left a comment on John's blog with a question about the status of the briefly-celebrated NewsGator extension. I first got excited about it when I saw Jeff Julian present it in Columbus, Ohio at an INETA user group meeting. It had me drueling! Well, maybe not drueling, but certainly excited. Update: Jeff Julian says this is the "Year of the Event." He points to an updated ESF/ESS spec. The other competitor for event syndication is the OpenEvent specification.

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