There are great standards on how to represent an event, specifying what, when, where, who, and even why. In particular, iCalendar (distinct from Apple's iCal software).
I think it's a failure of e-mail software to not have a formatting option to Insert Event (UPDATE 2: apparently, GMail now has this in their new compose window with the text "coming soon" next to it(!)), like you add an attachment, or bold a font. It can sometimes be frustrating to parse someone's verbosity to extract the essential information, and then to manually re-type or copy-paste it into your preferred calendaring application.
Google has tried to simplify this a bit by scanning e-mail text and, if they think they can accurate identify an event, provide you with a "Create event" link that automatically parses it. But usually it doesn't; e-mails are too difficult for computers to parse presently.
It's a bit frustrating that Facebook has a rich events system
My interest is to help minimise my chances of missing events that would otherwise be important to me. I make enough errors transcribing times or dates as is, and more structured information would make others' e-mails less frustrating.
Perhaps popularising iCalendar could become my mission?
How much time is an inordinate amount? Be specific.
ReplyDeleteHaha.
DeleteThere is enough information on my computer and in my browser that, if event information was well-formatted, it should require one click of a mouse to add information almost-perfectly to my calendar. Instead, the time required is several orders of magnitude greater than that. I have to
1) read the e-mail closely, identifying essential information (a non-trivial task given many e-mails)
2) open my calendar
3) make about 4 mouse clicks and write about 50 characters to transcribe information; additional costs from having to refer back between units of essential information, and having to switch modes (e.g. clicking dates, to typing subjects or locations).
4) reviewing what I've transcribed to reduce chance of errors
5) clean up (close calendar, potentially, switch back to first tab)
As you can see, this requires 100-500x as much effort as simply clicking a "calendar event" box that could appear in the e-mail with its essential information. Inordinate indeed.
I'm not persuaded that you've marshalled your facts and arguments without bias or exaggeration. But I grant you your point.
ReplyDelete