Hi Tim,

--On Thursday, December 4, 2003 17:46 +0000 Tim Benest 
<thb <at> taskforce.co.uk> wrote:

| Just to put another spanner in the works, why not store the Prefs as an
| XML file that could be stored in a directory served on an https (or http
| if you don't care for security) server. The prefs could then be
| downloaded and used by the client. I guess one could just store the
| existing mulberry exported prefs file on an http server and use wget or
| the like to grab the file in a script prior to loading mulberry. There
| are lots of solutions to this problem, it just requires a little bit of
| creativity.

The XML/HTTP approach is what is now being locked at in the IETF:

<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-simple-xcap-00.txt>

| I guess my bottom line is that one of the things that I *REALLY LIKE*
| about mulberry is the fact that it adheres to Standards, I would not like
| for it to move away from this solid base.

The problem has been that there is no widely adopted standard for doing 
this. ACAP was supposed to be a standard solution but was too complex so 
did not get any vendor buy-in. XCAP is supposed to address just the 
preferences part of the original ACAP design - and it does look promising 
as a solution which vendors will buy in to. It does not directly solve the 
address book portion - in theory it could, but I think a WebDAV solution 
might be more appropriate (where the fundamental data type is vCard rather 
than XML as vCard is widely supported by address book apps right now).

-- 
Cyrus Daboo