E-mail isn't perfect, however as a transport system is is not meant to solve the problem you described in "Replace e-mail".
If someone wants to have a meeting with me, they might send me an .ics attachment[1] that will work with almost ANY software that I have my computer. Since most meetings are in fact in-person and something that we have been doing as a civilization for some time, the semantics are well defined and easy to model.
A task list will always be harder to model, but not impossible and there is certainly a lot of ideas on the topic. As long as it is an open standard this sounds great, but I wouldn't like to see my tasks locked into either a proprietary format or the cloud[2].
If you are going to replace something that is standards based, it should be with a new standard of some sort. Not code, that's an implementation detail, but standard.
If someone wants to have a meeting with me, they might send me an .ics attachment[1] that will work with almost ANY software that I have my computer. Since most meetings are in fact in-person and something that we have been doing as a civilization for some time, the semantics are well defined and easy to model.
A task list will always be harder to model, but not impossible and there is certainly a lot of ideas on the topic. As long as it is an open standard this sounds great, but I wouldn't like to see my tasks locked into either a proprietary format or the cloud[2].
If you are going to replace something that is standards based, it should be with a new standard of some sort. Not code, that's an implementation detail, but standard.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
2. I'm too old for this shit, and not everyone lives in the cloud.