Replying to Eran’s post about SSE (because real man don’t comment, real man trackback):
Calendar data? Easy. Contacts? Easy. Just use hCalendar and hCard to represent those. What did you just get? Is this a feed of your events that also serves as your calendar? Amazing! And importing contacts into your favorite PIM application is as easy as applying a XSLT? Magic! Synchronization can be done as per Microsoft’s schema or, since we’re just dealing with XHTML here, use any existing solution. How about DAV?
I wouldn’t put DAV and simple in the same sentence without some form of negation.
DAV is good, but DAV is designed to update a resource, one resource at a time. So a week worth of calendar with 20 events is 20 DAV updates. DAV doesn’t handle conflicts, protocols that use DAV do (SVN is a good one). SSE is updates for lists of item, and that’s actually a perfect fit for microcontent, you’re updating a lot of small items in one message. And I buy the conflict resolution algorithm.
SSE doesn’t decide whether you use iCal or hCal, that’s really between who’s sending and who’s receiving to decide, and quite frankly, we’re talking about synchronization here, stuff you don’t want to see, just make it happen. (X)HTML may not win here for simplicity. I don’t care what my calendar uses to talk to your calendar, as long as it works.
But before it sounds like I’m hyping SSE, I’m just trying to correct some assumptions. I just don’t find the comparison to DAV relevant, and if I’m updating in multiple places, I don’t want to do the right-order deadlock avoiding imports, I want the software to take care of that.
SSE is really just SyncML reincarnated. SyncML, at least in theory, is great because it solves a real problem, one I’d pay money for. Go ask any CrackBerry user. It has the promise of Palm/WinCE/Desktop synchronization, but extends to cell phones, Web services and, well let’s just say more than just Outlook.
Except SyncML never happend. Well, you know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, brand it Web 2.0 and try again. Better yet, call it Really Simple Something. Don’t confuse Really Simple with really simple. I should post about that in English 2.0.
So what do I like about SSE? That maybe finally someone will solve the synchronization problem, and this time include my blog, and my phone, and upcoming.org and killer here: Thunderbird.
What don’t I like about SSE? Everything I hate about XML, plus I’d like to stay away from anything Really Simple. It makes life really simple.
Correction: real man upgrade their blog software regularly to fix trackback and other glitches, and don’t misspell trackback. I will now retire to bed in shame.