Discussion: Replace /calendar with /events

[p5quared]

I wanted to make a quick suggestion that is to replace the calendar page with an events page.

This is partly a semantic difference, but here is my thought process:

Calendars are Relational.

Calendars represent events in a relational manner, that is, with reference to each other, the day of the week, the month, year, etc... I argue that so long as there is not consistent overlap with the events displayed, most of these relationships are irrelevant or at least secondary for UX.

If I want to view events, I'd rather read about the event first and then, if I am interested, I will find how it will fit into my schedule.

Distillation is Difficult

In a calendar you cannot write a lot of information in each square. Leaving users with a few short, words is fine when the users are writing the descriptions themselves, but distilling an event's details to a few words that will be quickly understood is very difficult. Of course, users may be able to click on a calendar event to learn more, but if you have more than a couple events you want to quickly view this becomes annoying.

In an events page, one could list event titles as headers, and add things like tags and descriptions that are of variable length, besides links to dedicated pages events may have.

Beautiful Calendars are Hard

While an iframe containing a GCalendar is a solution, iframes break the design of your site and are often troublesome to control. IFrames also often pose accessibility ussues; in my brief testing, a large amount of the iframe being used is inaccessible without the mouse.

Designing native calendars is notoriously troublesome. Libraries exist but I still maintain that a calendar itself may be the wrong element.

A page with a simple list is easy to design and maintain, not to mention extend with things like filtering.