[Dev] The Chandler/Cosmo sharing format

[Reid Ellis]

On Mar 1, 2006, at 21:26, Morgen Sagen wrote:
> The drawbacks are:
> [..]
> 2) We have to publish two different resources to share a single  
> CalendarEvent (or any item that is stamped as an event); this  
> causes problems when, for whatever reason, there is a .xml resource  
> on Cosmo without a matching .ics resource
> [..]
> 3) We should strive to use existing standards.  Some obvious ones:
>    - test/vcard			vCard v3.0		http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt
>    - text/calendar		iCalendar		http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
>    - text/message		MIME Message	http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt
> [..]
> 5) We shouldn't have to publish multiple resources to share a  
> single item

Having two files for any atomic entity is indeed a bad idea. I would  
suggest wrapping multiple files in some sort of envelope to prevent  
this.

You could use something like mime's multipart or even zip (which  
gives the added benefit of compression and directory structure, if  
desired).

Once you know multiple files are in such an envelope, you can name  
them and have them reference each other by those names, which can be  
a powerful mechanism.

Reid