On 2004.9.24, at 11:34 AM, Chris Devers wrote:
On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, Joel Rees wrote:
I don't know about .vcf, but .csv is fairly easy to just look at with a text editor (formatting off, of course).
VCF is (basically) an ascii format. You can encode binary data (e.g.
photos) in it, but it's base64 encoded (just like email) so you can poke
at it with a regular text editor.
A typical entry might look something like this:
BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Meyer;Russ;;; FN:Russ Meyer EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=HOME;type=pref:[EMAIL PROTECTED] item1.EMAIL;type=INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED] item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_ TEL;type=HOME;type=pref:800 555.1212 item2.ADR;type=HOME;type=pref:;;42 Any Lane \n;Hollywood;CA;12345;United States item2.X-ABADR:us X-AIM;type=HOME;type=pref:rmvix END:VCARD
Now that you mention it, I guess I have looked at those with a text editor.
Etc. It's a little confusing,
Not so much confusing as just got a lot of stuff in it. Looks like colons for the element labels and semicolons for the element delimiters. And I think I see a buried newline escaped with a backslash. Hmm. Who made this format up, anyway?
My goodness, these things have got RFCs behind them:
http://www.imc.org/pdi/
Surprised they don't mention any movement to convert these to XML.
but it's mostly a regular format that isn't too hard to read or otherwise work with.
Well, ...
(One of these days, we have to put ASCII behind us, but that's a topic for a
rainy weekend or two.)
???
Every tool has a role; ascii has lots and lots and lots of useful ones. Also roles that it's totally wrong for, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense to get rid of it altogether...
Yeah, but it's time to move on. (I'm busy in my spare time trying to invent an encoding scheme that includes a variety of meta-punctuation, including meta-field separators. Of course, by this point, I'm duplicating effort by the Unicode consortium, to a certain extent.)
-- Joel Rees
