Westin's Technical Log : Schemas

xCal Schema

wkriebel — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:50:14 GMT

In an earlier post, xCalendar, I echoed a need for a XML calendar syndication standard (that isn't based on RSS).

I found an xCal schema:

OpenSearch XSD

wkriebel — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:14:50 GMT

In my last post Search Your Internal Site From Internet Explorer I talked about how to expose a search to your site so that it will light up the Internet Explorer Search Box. I referred to OpenSearch. The site refers to an XML schema spec, but does not provide a schema.

XML is one of my weekend hobbies, and XML schemas are one of the best intersections between linguistics and programming.

XSD OpenSearch XSD Schema

For those of you using XML editors and want to validate that your Search Provider file is using the correct schema, or want intellisense, I put together the above XSD schema.

View RSS or possibly xCalendar in Outlook 2003

wkriebel — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 21:14:00 GMT

There is an interesting article on MSDN entitled “Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003” which contains a hidden gem: a way to integrate RSS with a Calendar view in Outlook 2003.

I should also point out that this opens up the possibility for folks to have Outlook calendar view integration, previously reserved only for SharePoint lists based on the event list template, now available to arbitrary SharePoint lists or even document libraries. Not to say that this wasn't possible before, but now it is neatly documented.

I have been working to try to dust off the idea that Ray Ozzie and others have mentioned about providing a similar syndication format for calendar information. I think this is a marvelous idea. This all pivots around one of the key tenets of successful knowledge management which is unanticipated repurposing of information. This has been the hallmark of blogs' success in that folks who post an idea can have that posting repurposed all over the web in ways they had never originally planned. Schedules (not personal free/busy information) stand to benefit in an equally pervasive way.

RSS can be misused to represent this information, and quite wonderfully integrated into Outlook as mentioned in the above article, but it is truly not well suited for this purpose. Ultimately, an xCalendar format needs to represent specifically calendar information. Imagine being able to get a XML xCalendar feed from Craig's List of garage sales in your area using a calendar aggregator, or area events from eVite aggregated with events from Meetup, etc.

xCalendar

wkriebel — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 22:41:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie of Groove points out a great idea in his September 2003 entry: xCal. An XML equivalent to iCal that is supported by Outlook and behaves like RSS.

The IETF has an XML DTD for iCalendar but it hasn't taken off like the world Ray describes where he can syndicate his beloved Celtics calendar.

I think we should encourage this to spread like RSS has.

RSS 2.0 XSD Schema

wkriebel — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:04:00 GMT

The following is an XSD representation of the RSS 2.0 specification. I did my best to adhere precisely to the specification, but please let me know if you find any discepencies. This XSD schema can be used to facilitate coding and RSS validation.

Click Here to Download the Schema

Update: There was an odd character in one of the descriptions. I removed it. This may have caused problems in some editors.