- From: Robin Berjon <robin@robineko.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:10:59 +0200
- To: Suresh Chitturi <schitturi@rim.com>
- Cc: "Rich Tibbett" <richt@opera.com>, <public-device-apis@w3.org>, <Frederick.Hirsch@nokia.com>
On Sep 29, 2010, at 02:28 , Suresh Chitturi wrote: > From: public-device-apis-request@w3.org [mailto:public-device-apis-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Rich Tibbett > Contrary to some belief the spec is not built solely around Portable > Contacts. It just happens that the PoCo spec has some pretty neat > descriptions of the elements that we are using and rather than copy/paste > we just refer to those descriptions instead. It is not intentionally > reliant on the PoCo spec. Perhaps we should just describe the elements > directly in our spec instead, > > Suresh>> Thanks for clarifying this. Unfortunately, this is not the case when you read the spec. I would strongly suggest that we re-use the descriptions from PoCo if they are appropriate rather than referencing them. This will ease a lot of things and will not give a wrong message to the audience. I remember you did have the descriptions in the previous versions. Copying rather than referencing is by and large a bad idea. If there is existing text that is good, and if that text is being actively maintained so that bugs are fixed, we should reference it so that we benefit from the bug fixes and don't create gratuitous divergences. This is basic editorial good practice. If there is a concern that some audiences might misinterpret this as a specific message, then we can simply clarify the situation with an appropriate introductory paragraph. > The attributes used in the W3C Contacts API equally belong to the vCard > standard. > > Suresh>> The key is which version of vCard. If you are saying vCard 4.0 I don't think it is good idea which is not frozen and not as commonly used and this is the same case with PoCo and CAB. Therefore, the push for a "minimum" set that can map well to all the candidate formats, and this is the best we can position ourselves at the moment. From what I gather there's some level of convergence towards vCard 3. "Frozen" is an attribution subject to qualification. An IETF draft in Last Call can be considered more stable and more frozen than a rushed specification from other organisations because the IETF is strong on interoperability. Rather than trying to categorise entire specifications which mostly tends to lead to organisational posturing, I would rather we looked at specific issues with what we currently have, and see if there are any real issues, and if so how we can address them, on a case by case basis. -- Robin Berjon robineko — hired gun, higher standards http://robineko.com/
Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 13:11:35 UTC