Hey Google, Yahoo! and 30 Boxes (and others).
PLEASE create places where I can simply POST vCards or iCals or microformats or JSON or something else to your services to add contacts and calendar entries. I’m not a web app, so I can’t get an API key. And I shouldn’t have to maintain login state when the browser is doing it for me. All I want is an easy way to add stuff to a logged in users account. Is that too much to ask?
With Yahoo! calendars and contact, as well as Google Calendar, I have to resort to undocumented URL syntax. Google Contacts I can’t do anything. 30 Boxes requires that the ics file be physically located on a server, although they have a URL syntax that kind of works.
It doesn’t even have to be a POST. If you could come up with some straightforward URL syntax, that would be great. Trying to figure out the stuff you guys have put together so far is incredibly painful.
So please. Help a guy out.
To get to the common ground, it should be fairly straightforward to map VCARD and VCALENDAR to application/x-www-form-urlencoded:
vcard-fn=Bubba&vcard-adr-region=Alabama&etc.
Why hasn’t anyone done this before?
Yes, that would be a nice Idea. A standard microformats syntax for REST “microREST”… like microJSON for JSON.
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The problem with GET is, that the URL could get very long, so I think a basik webservice with POST would be more efficient…
I’ve been thinking that an openactions.xml format maybe useful here, similar to opensearch.xml. This way sites that want to be microformat consumers could 1. ‘create a post url’ 2. ‘create an openactions.xml’ file. auto-discovery etc. can happen similar to opensearch (i.e. a entry).
This way in addition to reverse engineering what other sites are doing, providing sites a mechanism to integrate with FF/operator easily should go a longways to getting them to give users tools to unlock the value of their microformatted pages.
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