On Thu, 11 May 2000, Stefan Taferner wrote:
> But the problem is, as you stated before, that an email program usually only
> needs email addresses and groups of them. Nothing more. Everything else
> is extra.

From the email perspective, obviously.

> 
> This is different from the traditional addressbook approach where people
> are also stored with their postal address, etc.
> 
> The best solution IMO would be some sort of generic solution, e.g.
> have different address books in one big tree -- from the users point of view.
> LDAP comes into mind...

I've been hacking on KMail 1.0.29.1. I've been fixing what I consider to be
bugs and added a couple of filter options to my local copy. While doing this, I
had the notion of creating an address book/contacts application that uses a
custom XML DTD to store address information on friends and associates. A sample
record might look something like this:

<entry id="1">
<name>Jason Stephenson</name>
<street>1234 Main Street</street>
<city>Lexington</city>
<region>Kentucky</region>
<post_code>40503</post_code>
<email alias="panda">panda@mis.net</email>
<email alias="jason">jason@stephenson.net</email>
<email alias="office">jstephenson@tjcis.com</email>
</entry>

I think the actual DTD would be a bit more complicated, but you get the idea.
(I'd also like to come up with a way to store a simple list of email addresses,
so I can easily send one message to a bunch of friends using an alias.) With an
XML parser built into all your applications, you could easily access this
information from any app that you have. Naturally, KMail would just be
interested in names and email addresses.  Does that sound like something that
would fit the bill?