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

[loic]

 > 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?

        The downside is the need to maintain a format + tools to convert
them. The ideal situation is the following:

        standard format + existing tools to use the format

        Since we have:

        vCard + emacs vcard.el + vm vCard support + phpgroupware
AddressBook (import/export vCard). 

        it will make me happy + all web users. But I'm not the only
one ;-) What's the status of vCard support in GNUS ? mutt ? Are there
gnome based tools to handle vCard ? What are the best ones ? Is there
a vCard database system (no necessarily web based) to query + retrieve
vCards ? Can we do mass mailings + manage list of guests with a
software using vCard as a base ?

        This is only the beginning of a long list of questions. If you
replace vCard with our XML format it will add work (conversion) and
the benefit is unclear to me. 

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

        Yes, if we find no standard. I'm pretty sure there exists no standard
for managing donations. Sure, there exists some would-be standards to deal
with e-business data that can be used to manage donations. But they are so
big (dealing with all possible aspects of a company accounting) that we 
don't want to use them unless they are established standards : the 
investment to understand them and actually use them is so high that it
only worth the trouble if they are true standards.

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

        Yes, I also think we should point to vCard from other XML data we 
have. 

 > 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?

        The most obvious downside is that vCard is not XML. And that's
a big one. Appart from that I don't see any problem. vCard data may
even be integrated in XML files without problem but won't be parsed,
of course ;-)

 > If not, we might as well go with vCard.

        As I said in my previous mail, I'll try to use vCard for myself and
report problems/inconveniences I find. It would be nice to have an
experimented vCard user around who could tell us more.

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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