[Contacts-hackers] Re: Contact management system (was Re: Fund raising infrastructure)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

[I am going to slowly move this dicussion to <address@hidden>,
 which is the new mailing list for creating this contact management system
 for the FSF (and hopefully the FSF Europe as well).]

address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

>       vCard is not fit for that. You must use something else that points
> to a vCard. It's good that vCard does not allow this, it's two separate
> things.

Agreed; I realize it's different than vCard.

I did toy with the idea of pointing to a vCard with an XML-style database
entry.  But, then I decided that it would make more sense to have our own
XML DTD that described all the data we want to keep, and be able to export
and import vCard from that.  Do you think that is a bad idea?  Do you see
any downside?


>  Requiring the vCard format to be able to hold a task list of the data
> necessary to keep the history of a contact is not a good thing because
> it would lead to a very confusing definition.

Understandable.  So, do you think we should have separate DTDs for these
different parts?

>  > I agree.  I actually already started working a bit on an XML-based contact
>  > management system, but mostly only to brainstorm ideas.  I plan to start
>  > hacking this week or next, actually.
>
>       Yesterday I found a few pointers that may be of interest to you.
> See http://france.fsfeurope.org/server/#XML%20and%20interoperability

I saw some useful things in:
  http://www.hr-xml.org/schemas/dtd/cpo/personname-v1.0.dtd
  http://www.hr-xml.org/schemas/dtd/cpo/postaladdress-v1.0.dtd

Although I wasn't clear on their license.


If they are somehow standard, we could probably use these for our
PersonName and PostalAddress entries.  Although, I have yet to learn how
you can stack DTDs on top of each other.

Loic, is there a DTD tutorial that you see as definitive?

> I'm really unhappy that the XML vCard format is not maintained anymore.

Is it good, at least as it stands?  Perhaps we should use that as a
starting point?

>  > I agree, a module to import/export vCard will be necessary, but I don't
>  > think our central format should be vCard.
>
>       See
>
>  ftp://ftp.splode.com/pub/users/friedman/emacs-lisp/vm-vcard.el
>  ftp://ftp.splode.com/pub/users/friedman/emacs-lisp/vcard.el
>
>       I did not test them but the fact they exist is a good hint that
> we have some interest to stick to this de-facto standard.

I don't necessarily have a problem sticking with vCard for that part of
the information, and point to vCards from some XML format.

It seemed cleaner to do it all via XML, but if vCards work well, and it
seems to be a standard (I believe that GNOME is using them for Evolution).

Is there any downside to using vCard with some other XML-based structure
on top of that to keep the additional data?

If not, we might as well go with vCard.

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