Contacts API concerns (RE: Draft minutes, 2011-01-15)

Hi Frederick, all,


Here are the concerns I was trying to raise during the call (but could
not record them in IRC due to server issues:

1) The proposed contacts API draft does not offer a programmable JS API
for saving and updating contacts. Having a standard API (with e.g.
Contact.save() method) provides the benefit of being more efficient and
agnostic to the underlying format the implementation as we do with the
read API.

2) The ability to update and save as proposed in the draft is only a
informative approach that relies on the external scripts and imposes a
behavior on the user agent to register to a certain type of resource
also means a format needs to be mandated (that we generally should stay
away from it) for interoperability reasons. The user experience is also
something I question e.g. are you going to see x number of dialogs for x
number of contact saves by clicking on each of them. Further, the
assumption of this approach is that the format generated by the script
is the same format supported by the underlying implementation and this
is not true with all the native address book formats, and as a result
forces the implementation to convert from vcard in this case to the
native format. There may be other issues, e.g. some address book
implementations allow external implementations to only save contact
information as new contact entries and not to existing entries, so you
are only creating new entries as opposed to updating existing entries.

I do not have an objection to the approach in principle, but in my view
it is weak and should not be shown as the replacement to a "save" API.
My proposal is to reword the text to state that this is purely
informative in nature in the spec, and address the write-back
functionality through a standard API which is what we set out to do in
this group. 

E.g. in the Abstract, I would change the following sentence:

"This specification also provides normative guidelines for manipulating
a user's unified address book, to add and update contact information,
utilising existing web platform APIs and negating the need for such
mechanisms to be provided as part of a specialized Contacts API."

To:

"The ability to save and update existing contacts in the user's address
book through a specialized API is not supported in this release of the
specification. However, the specification provides informative
guidelines showing how one may manipulate a user's address book, to add
and update contact information, utilizing existing web platform APIs and
existing paradigms."

Similar text changes may be needed in other sections as well.

Regards,
Suresh

-----Original Message-----
From: public-device-apis-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-device-apis-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Frederick.Hirsch@nokia.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 10:26 AM
To: public-device-apis@w3.org
Cc: Frederick.Hirsch@nokia.com
Subject: Draft minutes, 2011-01-15

Draft minutes from today's call 2011-01-15. Due to networking issues
some of the material at the end might have been lost, please review.

Thanks to Claes for scribing. HTML follows text.

regards, Frederick

Frederick Hirsch
Nokia


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Received on Friday, 14 January 2011 00:05:31 UTC