Re: [VCARDDAV] wg concensus to publish? NO

[Joseph Smarr <[e-mail]>]

Mike-I agree with you assessment, which is why I would ask the flip-side of
your question: why publish vcard 4 unless/until we think it will materially
solve the problems you point out? Publishing a new spec always has a
cost--it will add confusion and consume time and increase legacy, as there's
one more version of one more spec to learn and support--and if the immediate
next step is to work on 4.1 with better alignment, more simplicity, etc.--as
you and others have often suggested--then I thing it begs the question of
what we gain by publishing now, other than "it's been 2 years, so people
would like to see a result", which i don't think is a good enough reason. :)

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Mike Douglass <[e-mail]> wrote:

>  My experience as a user is that current address book implementations are a
> completely non-interoperable disaster.
>
> I have had the unhappy experience of moving my wifes contacts 3 times -
> which has largely led her back to a paper address book - and i completely
> concur with her decision. I cannot, as an implementor, defend the current
> state of affairs. If you never have to move your contacts you may be fine.
> If you do, they will end up misordered, duplicated or just missing - I don't
> even move my own contacts - it almost never works.
>
> I mostly keep quiet at home about being a vcard 4/carddav implementor.
>
> This is all to say that we have nothing to congratulate ourselves on with
> the current state of affairs.
>
> One of the important questions for the short term - still unanswered - is:
>
> If we go ahead and publish vcard 4 core, what will prevent us getting
> better alignment with PoCo/W3c etc within some reasonable period of time in
> say version 4.1?
>
>
> On 09/28/2010 11:32 PM, Rohit Khare wrote:
>
>> On Sep 28, 2010, at 8:03 PM, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
>>
>>> I am a little confused by this statement. What "brand name" and which
>>> "non-IETF" standard are you referring to?
>>>
>>
>> You are correct, and I should be more careful. The pre-XML vCard3 standard
>> (RFC 2425/6) is a fairly direct mapping of the work of the Versit
>> Consortium, as acknowledged in the RFC (as was vCard 2.1 at the IMC, in
>> turn).
>>
>> You are also correct that I shouldn't call vCard "non-IETF", since rev 3.0
>> is a Proposed Standard regardless of its origins. vCard4 is a significant
>> improvement (but all the same, a significant departure) from the
>> line-by-line encoding that's in the marketplace today.
>>
>> The sense in which I believe my observation was intended to be fair and
>> helpful is that the term "vCard" as used by range of products, from embedded
>> hardware to the latest in social Web services in the cloud, all refer to the
>> loosely interoperable line-by-line encoding that's been in use for almost 20
>> years.
>>
>> Best,
>>  Rohit
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
>>
>>> Versitcard was originally proposed in 1995 by the Versit Consortium,
>>> which consisted of Apple, AT&T Technologies (later Lucent), IBM and Siemens.
>>> In December 1996, ownership of the format was handed over to the Internet
>>> Mail Consortium, a trade association for companies with an interest in
>>> Internet e-mail.
>>>
>> See also the press release handing off to Paul Hoffman,
>> http://www.imc.org/pdi/versit-to-imc.html
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> --
>
> Mike Douglass                           [e-mail]
> Senior Systems Programmer
> Communication&  Collaboration Technologies      518 276 6780(voice) 2809
> (fax)
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180
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