To give some concrete examples,
* The usual user-visible phone number and email address types (home, work, mobile, etc) aren’t mapped onto vcard type values in a standard way.
* The various parts of the ADR field are not standardised and don’t accurately capture international addresses. The *order* that the parts should be displayed in isn’t even consistent across applications.
* There’s no agreement about how to represent the contact data for an organization (as distinct to an individual).

I mean, just have a look at http://microformats.org/wiki/vcard-implementations

The last time I looked at this stuff I came away amazed that any non-technical users manage to have any kind of success with this kind of thing. I was trying to write a script to merge together the contacts from my Series 60 Nokia phone, Evolution on Linux, Outlook and GMail, all exported in vcard format, and finished up with a fat ball of heuristics that probably only worked for the few hundred cards I was working with.

vcard is probably fine if you define the 80% use-case as ‘extract a list of email addresses we can spam’, but as the basis for an API it falls well short.

Any chance that you’d be able to open-source the code so we don’t all have to pay the “tax”?

Should we draw up needs or get suggestions for the best way forward using existing solutions (but prepared to shift if it is warranted)

Nice breakdown!

I will have to work with all these APIs at some point soon as people using what I am building will likely span all services (though I only really use one).

While I could simply focus on the initial service I am interested in and then write code for each of the next ones I think it makes sense to create a read/write facade so I only need to deal with one API.

To keep it cross-platform and tool independent (most of my stuff is in C) I was thiking of creating a stylesheet with the physical implemention (how/when) of the transform left up to the developer. I could use the structure offered by OpenSocial as a baseline…

Does this make sense? Do you think this (the mapping stylesheet) would be something useful for the community? If so once done I could release it out into the wild for others to use.

Cheers,

Christopher