Re: [apps-discuss] Webfinger

["Paul E. Jones" <[e-mail]>]

Simon,

There is certainly some overlap with the kinds of information Webfinger
provides and vcard provides.  However, Webfinger solves a problem vcard was
not designed to solve: finding the user's information in the first place.
If I already have a vcard in hand, that's great, but I usually do not.

You can imagine a point in the future where one may not even need to have an
address book containing anything more than email (er, "acct" URIs).  The
email client, phone application, web portal, etc. could grab all of the
other information as needed via Webfinger.  I would hope vcard would be a
part of that.

As Blane mentioned separately, some data that might be provided via
Webfinger (i.e., some link relations) may not be appropriate for a vcard.
For example, my list of identity providers may not be secret, but probably
not what I'd want to publish via a vcard.

We've had some discussion on whether link relations should be defined as a
part of the Webfinger spec or separately.  It seems most people are of the
opinion that they should be defined in a separate document.  Thus, I'd
invite you to work on the vcard link relation spec. This would be added to
the registry established by RFC 5988, I believe.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Perreault [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Monday, November 21, 2011 1:27 PM
> To: Paul E. Jones
> Cc: [e-mail]; Joseph Smarr; Gonzalo Salgueiro
> Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Webfinger
> 
> Paul E. Jones wrote, on 10/24/2011 04:09 PM:
> > We just submitted this:
> >
> > http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-jones-appsawg-webfinger-00.t
> > xt
> 
> One general comment I have is that there seems to be a lot of overlap
> with features already in vCard or that could be defined as extensions to
> vCard. Let's take for example one example from the draft:
> 
>      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>      <XRD xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/xri/xrd-1.0">
>        <Subject>acct:[e-mail]</Subject>
>        <Link rel="http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar"
>              href="http://example.com/bob/images/avatar.jpg"/>
>        <Link rel="blog"
>              href="http://example.net/bob/blog/"/>
>        <Link rel="vcard"
>              href="http://example.com/bob/vcard.vcf"/>
>        <Link rel="http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/provider"
>              href="https://openid.example.com/bob"/>
>        <Link rel="share" href="http://example.com/bob/public/"/>
>        <Link rel="http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page"
>              href="http://example.com/bob/profile/"/>
>      </XRD>
> 
> All of the <Link> elements, except the one pointing to the vCard itself,
> could be contained inside the vCard.
> 
> Did you look at vCard and find it inappropriate for your needs?
> 
> Simon
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