Re: Why not vCard?

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Renato Iannella <renato@iannella.it> wrote:

>
> On 9 Sep 2010, at 18:45, Rich Tibbett wrote:
>
> > My current plan was to stick with the basic Portable Contacts set
> included in the spec and then provide clear extension guidelines for
> developers to provide the larger set of OpenSocial properties as required.
>
> Why are these Open Social properties so important in a users *address* book
> ?
> eg: heroes, pets, turnOffs, turnOns, scaredOf, happiestWhen, bodyType,
> tvShows...
> Do you really want to put those explicitly in the API?
>

They are not explicitly included in the current API.

Shouldn't they (and everyone else's) be available via an extension
> mechanism?
>

That is what I proposed above.

They are not included in the current API with the exception of a note saying
that they still need to be considered. The proposal is to do that as part of
general extension guidelines. If we could fully define these extension
properties before they get used then the cost is less than not specifying
anything at all.


>
> Contacts API should aim for the core - based on the most widely used
> *industry* *standard*.
>

It is my understanding that with the exception of 'connected', 'accounts'
and the more detailed 'organisations' included in the current W3C spec we
have a lossless mapping to the current vCard version 4.0 draft. Saying the
W3C Contacts API maps to Portable Contacts at the expense of vCard is
probably a misrepresentation of the actual content of the specification.
That's with the exception of the note included in the spec regarding the
under-speced OpenSocial attributes contained within Portable Contacts...that
will be subsumed to an Extensions section of the spec anyway as per the
current proposal.

If I export from a Portable Contacts format to vCard and back to Portable
Contacts I want whatever content was originally included to still be
available, right? I have high hopes that the vCard Social Formats Extensions
draft [1] will provide clear mappings for Portable Contacts properties to
the vCard format to make the process of moving between these formats
lossless and well-defined across both web services and devices.

- Rich