Re: [VCARDDAV] KIND in draft 15

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi Joseph,

--On December 21, 2010 9:56:30 AM -0800 Joseph Smarr <[e-mail]> 
wrote:

>>  Nearly all desktop contacts clients have some concept of a group like
>> this, so what v4 is doing is providing them with a way to exchange that
>> information as well as individual contacts. I think this counts as
>> progress.
>
>
> Of course I agree that groups are a common thing that deserves some
> better formal support. But I think this approach is a poor hack that is
> likely to cause more harm than good. Were other approaches discussed,
> perhaps outside of individual vCards with new tags to define group info
> and metadata that downlevel clients would just ignore?
>

Just to be clear, the current behavior we have for AB.app + CardDAV does 
not cause any problems. Yes, it does mean that users of clients that do not 
understand the X-KIND value see groups as contacts, but those "contacts" 
have the group name and apart from that appear totally empty (no email 
address etc). Provided those clients correctly "roundtrip" those vcards 
(and in theory there is no reason they would write them back to the server 
since users will simply not edit them) then everything is fine (except for 
the case where the user may be confused and deletes the "group"). There is 
certainly no real interoperability problem here.

What is potentially an issue is users being confused by these "group" 
contacts. I don't think that is a big deal and the clients have easy 
upgrade paths to deal with that: (1) simply ignore the KIND:group, (2) 
fully support groups. Now (1) may be an issue if the client deletes a 
contact in a group - that would lead to a group with a non-existent member 
- but that is a situation that can arise for any number of reasons and is 
something "group aware" clients will have to deal with regardless.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo