[uf-discuss] Microformats + Thunderbird

[brian suda]

One of the things on my Todo list is to build a stand alone application
that would interface with an address book. (at the moment on the Apple
Address Book, because that's what i have and there is a document API[1]
- Scott Reyen just beat me to this link).

When this program would run it would go through the address book and
look for some sort of flag. In vCard there is a SOURCE property, this is
where the SOURCE of the vCard came from, sometimes this is an LDAP URI,
or an website URL. With X2V this is a link to the webservice and the
hCard to be extracted to vCard.

This program would then go through all the SOURCE properties and fetch
the vCards and update the local address book as needed based on the
updated information people have published about themselves.

This would be a truly distributed address book, no more Third-party
Plaxo type services.

I'm not sure how the Thunderbird or Windows Address Book works, but if
there is an Open API then there is no reason why an application can't be
created to fetch hCards, convert them to vCards and import them.

I'm not sure you would want to save anything locally because the local
data could get stale. If you 'fetch' the data each time you are wasting
bandwidth, but will always get the most recent data.

-brian

[1] -
http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/AppleApplications/AddressBook.html

Chris Messina wrote:
> Well, I have no idea. I'm speaking from the perspective of a) an
> end-user and b) someone who knows XHTML.
>
> Admittedly I'm underrepresenting the potential complexity of the
> problem, but since Address Book presumably works with the vcard
> standard, why don't I have a folder in ~/Documents called Address
> Book? Why don't I have a ton of HTML files in there for each person...
> instead of vcards, just HTML snippets?
>
> The benefit? Well, for one thing, any app can grab data from there.
> Second, I can go in and hand edit the files. Third, I can save out an
> hcard from any webpage and "add it" to my address book simply by
> creating a text file.
>
> Again, this probably isn't exactly an efficient solution given the
> potential number of files, but it certainly would be portable! And it
> would also mean that Thunderbird + iCal + Address Book + any other app
> would have access to one uniform store of addresses.
>
> Let me rephrase a little bit here... Thunderbird needs a
> cross-platform store for addresses. It would be unwise to rely on the
> Mac address book since it's overly platform specific... similarly,
> relying on Outlook's address book on the PC or anything else would be
> counterproductive (there might be other reasons -- I'm just
> extrapolating here). So anyway, XHTML obviously would work
> everywhere... and be totally portable and easy to read in. I dunno, am
> I missing something here because this use case seems like an ideal
> application of microformats?
>
> Chris
>
> On 1/31/06, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
>   
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> Hmm. I'm not sure if I understand your solution.  To avoid
>> corruption, I'm pretty sure AddressBook doesn't want people writing
>> directly to its private data store (regardless of format), so there
>> needs to be some API.
>>
>> Now, the idea of an "hCard" API for data access is interesting (and
>> perhaps RESTful :-), but a simpler solution would arguably be to
>> reuse a format they already have in common, like LDAP.  Wouldn't it?
>>
>> --- Ernie P.
>>
>> On Jan 31, 2006, at 8:01 AM, Chris Messina wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Blogged about a little idea, probably obvious to most of us, but I
>>> imagine that someone could actually figure out how to get this going
>>> if they really wanted to... cross-platform address book and
>>> everything, you know?
>>>
>>> http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/01/31/microformats-thunderbird/
>>>
>>> Chris
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> microformats-discuss mailing list
>>> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
>>> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>>>       
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>>     
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