vCard revised specifications - more closer alignment to what CIQ does

[kumar.sydney@gmail.com]

IETF Last Call for vCard XML Representation and vCard Format Specification
Simon Perreault and Peter W. Resnick (eds), IETF Internet Drafts

Marc Blanchet, Co-Chair of the IETF vCard and CardDAV (VCARDDAV) Working
Group, announced a Working Group Last Call (WGLC) review for two "core"
vCard specifications: "vCard XML Representation" and "vCard Format
Specification." The WGLC deadline is December 31 2010, after which the
WG expects to develop extension specifications.

The IETF vCard and CardDAV (VCARDDAV) Working Group was chartered to
produce a revision of the vCard specification (RFC 2426) at proposed
standard status, along with an address book access protocol leveraging
the vCard data format. "A personal address book (PAB) contains a
read/write copy of attributes describing a user's interpersonal contacts.
This is distinct from a directory which contains a primarily read-only
copy of users within an organization. While these two data objects share
a large number of common attributes, their use and access patterns are
fundamentally different. The IETF has a standards-track data format
(vCard) which has been successfully used to interchange both
personal-address-book and user directory entry data objects. However,
due to the lack of a standard access control model for LDAP, the lack
of a standard LDAP schema and DIT-model for vCard PAB objects, and
the different access patterns for PAB data (as opposed to directory
data), the use of LDAP as an access protocol for PABs has had mixed
results in practice. Moreover, the vCard format has been extended
by many parties and the current specification is ambiguous for some
objects....

The new 'vCard Format Specification' "defines the vCard data format for
representing and exchanging a variety of information about individuals
and other entities (e.g., formatted and structured name and delivery
addresses, email address, multiple telephone numbers, photograph, logo,
audio clips, etc.). Electronic address books have become ubiquitous.
Their increased presence on portable, connected devices as well as the
diversity of platforms exchanging contact data call for a standard... In
this core specification, the text/vcard MIME content type contains
contact information, typically pertaining to a single contact or group
of contacts. The content consists of one or more lines; individual lines
within vCard are delimited by the line break, which is a CRLF sequence
(ASCII decimal 13, followed by ASCII decimal 10). Long logical lines of
text can be split into a multiple-physical-line representation using
the following folding technique. Content lines SHOULD be folded to a
maximum width of 75 octets. Multi-octet characters MUST remain
contiguous..."

The specification "vCard XML Representation" defines the XML schema of
the vCard data format. "The underlying data structure for the XML
representation is exactly the same as for the text-based vCard Format
Specification, enabling a 1-to-1 mapping between the original vCard
format and the XML representation. The XML formatting may be preferred
in some contexts where an XML engine is readily available and may be
reused instead of writing a stand-alone vCard parser. The XML schema is
expressed in the RELAX NG language (compact) as presented in Appendix A
of the specification. The general idea is to map vCard parameters,
properties, and value types to XML elements. For example, the 'FN'
property is mapped to the 'fn' element. That element in turn contains a
text element whose content corresponds to the vCard property's value.
vCard parameters are also mapped to XML elements. They are contained in
the 'parameters' markup element, which is contained in property elements..."

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardxml-06.txt
See also the vCard Format Specification: http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-15.txt