[Telepathy] New ContactInfo interface based on vCards

Dafydd Harries dafydd.harries at collabora.co.uk
Wed Dec 3 07:55:51 PST 2008


Ar 25/11/2008 am 11:26, ysgrifennodd Simon McVittie:
> On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 at 11:08:00 +0000, Dafydd Harries wrote:
> > Ar 20/11/2008 am 12:09, ysgrifennodd Will Thompson:
> > > (Contrast with the old interface, which
> > > represented vCards as... a string containing a vCard. :-))
> 
> No, it represented vCards as a string containing XML structured
> according to an abandoned, expired RFC draft, in which each XML element
> had the same name as a vCard concept, except CTRY which was inexplicably
> renamed to COUNTRY (this is the same XML used by the XMPP 'vcard-temp'
> protocol, which has unfortunately turned out to be anything but temporary).
> 
> A string containing a vCard would have been a considerable improvement.
> 
> > > While vCard
> > > is kind of hairy and suboptimal, it's widely used (both XEPs relating to
> > > contact info are based on vCard) and there's no point in defining
> > > another format only to have to map to and from the vCard semantics in
> > > every CM.
> > 
> > If vCards are widely used, perhaps sending and receiving them as strings is
> > not such a bad thing. Otherwise software that already supports them has to
> > be modified to support our new interface, or has to undo the translation that
> > the connection manager does. Essentially, we *have* defined another format,
> > it's just not a text one, and software will have to do lots of mapping back
> > and forth.
> 
> I believe the idea was to avoid requiring every connection manager
> to be able to compose and parse arbitrary vCards; with a structured D-Bus API,
> the CMs have to be able to map their own semantics to vCard, but they don't
> have to understand the syntax.

But if most connection managers are just passing through vCard data, then it's
less work overall. It's just that Gabble would have to grow code to convert
bizzaro XML vCards to text vCArds.

-- 
Dafydd


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