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[Contacts-hackers] Re: Contact management system (was Re: Fund raising i
From: |
loic |
Subject: |
[Contacts-hackers] Re: Contact management system (was Re: Fund raising infrastructure) |
Date: |
Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:48:31 +0200 |
> 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
75019 Paris Tel: 33 1 42 45 09 16 address@hidden
GPG Public Key: http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt