Re: [VCARDDAV] KIND in draft 15

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi Joseph,

--On December 21, 2010 7:55:23 AM -0800 Joseph Smarr <[e-mail]> 
wrote:

> Let me just add (at the risk of dragging this thread out any longer) that
> one reason KIND:GROUP is a *bad* idea IMO is that clients who aren't
> aware of it will end up with a "contact" that is not really a "contact",
> so you're kind of polluting the list of vCards. 
>
>
> It's one thing to specify KIND for things like companies or
> autoresponders that really do show up *in* people's address books as
> contacts. You could even do the same for KIND:MAILING-LIST for
> yahoo/google/ietf-group mailing lists with a single address that shows up
> in your contacts. In those cases, if you ignore KIND (as most/all clients
> will do for the foreseeable future, by definition), it doesn't hurt
> you--you thought you had a normal contact, and you do, you're just
> missing some helpful classification information. 
>
>
> But to store contact group metadata in a fake contact and then try to
> "hide" it by saying KIND:GROUP is a very different thing. That's not a
> normal contact, and a client that ignores it will not only miss the
> metadata there, they'll end up with a bogus contact that wasn't in their
> address book before. That seems unacceptable to me, unless I'm missing
> something about the source of these KIND:GROUP contacts.

Well the point is we are expecting vCard v4 clients to understand the 
difference. A client that only knows about vCard v3 in theory will reject 
the v4 cards. 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.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo