[uf-discuss] Re: To-do items?

[Tom Morris]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Ryan King <ryan at theryanking.com> wrote:
>  It can be resolved by saying that no one has gotten around to
>  specifying how the other iCalendar objects would work in hCalendar.
>

It would seem sensible to perhaps implement any to-do list format
using that ever-useful (X)HTML structure, the list. It would be quite
simple to do - have the tasks as the outer-most children in the list,
with the parent nodes representing higher and higher level 'projects'
(in GTD speak) or just collections of tasks. Obviously, ol and ul
could signify whether the tasks are ordered (and should therefore be
done sequentially) or unordered (any order is fine). For due dates,
one could use a the abbr-datetime pattern. Also, tags and maybe hCard
could be reused to represent GTD-style contexts and collaborators,
contacts or 'waiting for'.

Do to-do lists really require anything extravagantly more complex than
a list structure? I'm not sure they do.

There are some possible use cases for a to-do list format. Off the top
of my head, it could be implemented in things like bug trackers
(Bugzilla, Trac etc.) so that software developers could have their
tools (text editors and IDEs like TextMate, NetBeans and emacs) pull
in action items, a sort of RSS-style task aggregation and distribution
and so on as well as complementing hCalendar in Outlook and iCal-style
PIMs. I think that the success of tools like TaskPaper on the Mac
point to the need for simple solutions. If this gets picked up, it'll
be interesting to see what the Microformats community come up with -
I've been doing a little bit of GTD noodling with the command line and
the RDF stack.

-- 
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/