* Simon Perreault wrote:
Type name: text
Subtype name: vcard
Required parameters: none
Optional parameters: version
The "version" parameter is to be interpreted identically as the VERSION vCard property. If this parameter is present, all vCards in a text/vcard body part MUST have a VERSION property with value identical to that of this MIME parameter.
This should probably say that not only the semantic but also the syntax is the same as for the "VERSION" property.
Encoding considerations: The "charset" MIME parameter, if present, MUST be set to "UTF-8", as defined in [RFC3629].
The "charset" parameter would have to be defined under "optional parameters"; this field should have one of the values defined in RFC 4288 (7bit, framed, binary, or 8bit). Further, this should first define syntax and semantics of the parameter value and then limit the set of permissable values, so something like '"charset": as defined for text/plain; encodings other than UTF-8 [STD0063] must not be used." I do note that there are plenty of applications that treat text types with a charset parameter as being text in the specified encoding, while such an imposed limit will cause some implementations to treat documents as UTF-8 encoded regardless of the parameter; that in turn can be a se- curity vulnerability and should be noted in the Security Considerations.
Interoperability considerations: The text/vcard media type is intended to identify vCard data of any version. There are older specifications of vCard [RFC2426][oldreference_VCARD] still in common use. While these formats are similar, they are not strictly compatible. In general, it is necessary to inspect the value of the VERSION property (see Section 6.7.9) for identifying the standard to which a given vCard object conforms.
In addition, the following media types are known to have been used to refer to vCard data. They should be considered deprecated in favor of text/vcard.
* text/directory
* text/directory; profile=vcard
* text/x-vcard
I've just posted a comment on this to vcarddav@ietf.org.
Published specification: draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-13
Applications that use this media type: They are numerous, diverse, and include mail user agents, instant messaging clients, address book applications, directory servers, customer relationship management software, etc.
The trailing "etc." is unnecessary here as it is clear that these are only examples. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/