Re: Contacts API updates

Hi,

On 14.1.2011, at 21.13, Hirsch Frederick (Nokia-CIC/Boston) wrote:

> From a process perspective I believe we can reference vCard 4, though the bibliography entry should note it is  a draft and subject to change. This does require a guess as to timing - we cannot go to REC with a draft reference.

Thanks for reminding me of the process :)

> Alternatively we might be better off referencing vCard 3.0. (Adding an editors note that we might reference vCard 4.0 in the future might be helpful)

Referencing vCard 3.0 [RFC2426] and adding a note with a pointer to vCard 4.0 Internet-Draft [1] (w/o the -version suffix to always point to the latest) would perhaps be the best option for now?

> Is the only benefit of referencing 4.0 the sync mechanisms? What are the implications of referencing 3 vs 4 apart from maturity of the spec? Is vCard 4.0 backwardly compatible with vCard 3?

There's certainly more than just the sync. Differences from RFCs 2425 and 2426 are enumerated at [2]. As an added bonus there's the vCard XML representation [3] which is a 1-to-1 mapping between the vCard 4.0 format and the XML representation.

Re backward compatibility, the section "10.1. MIME Type Registration" [1] says:

[[

   Interoperability considerations:  The text/vcard media type is
      intended to identify vCard data of any version.  There are older
      specifications of vCard [RFC2426][oldreference_VCARD] still in
      common use.  While these formats are similar, they are not
      strictly compatible.  In general, it is necessary to inspect the
      value of the VERSION property (see Section 6.7.9) for identifying
      the standard to which a given vCard object conforms.

      In addition, the following media types are known to have been used
      to refer to vCard data.  They should be considered deprecated in
      favor of text/vcard.

      *  text/directory

      *  text/directory; profile=vcard

      *  text/x-vcard

]]

-Anssi

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-15#appendix-A
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardxml

Received on Monday, 17 January 2011 16:02:12 UTC