Why not vCard?

I am actually quite surprised that Portable Contacts is what the Contacts API WD is based on.

All of the attributes listed in that Working Draft are pretty much what is in vCard (the industry standard with the widest deployment, from the IETF). I did not see the xtra social attributes listed (eg food, heroes, etc) used by PoCo.

I tried to look thru the email archives to see why....and found a small discussion [1] with the argument:

  "As PoCo represents a larger set of Contact attributes, I'd like to propose that we make PoCo the basis of the DAP Contacts API"

Again, this "larger set" is not evident in the WD.

Was this the right decision to make? Given the provenance and industry acceptance of vCard?

And, ironically, the Introduction [2] says "The API itself is agnostic of any underlying address book sources"

Cheers

Renato Iannella
http://renato.iannella.it

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2009Nov/0045.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-contacts-api-20100701/#introduction

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