#dev 2026-02-06

2026-02-06 UTC
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gRegor tantek did something with this recently. I see his avatar when I add to homescreen on Android. He has a few rel-icons, not sure which one is being used.
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gRegor Mine does not, maybe because I only have an .ico. Tantek has PNG and JPG options.
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gRegor Will check into that more later, curious now
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[morgan] At least 2-3 times I've launched small websites with a bunch of open graph stuff, updated the website, forgot to update the og tags, go to repost it then it's cached or acts odd hours later. This is not science or data backed but basically I think a favicon or logo + title + meta description gets my projects at their "scale" like 90%+ the way
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[morgan] In terms of how it's received in someone's device
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gRegor Yeah, even though FB and others don't explicitly advertise it, we've found in practice they fall back to reasonable things, like the meta description tag. More documentation on /OGP
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gRegor Their share debugger is handy to run fresh scrapes, because they do cache aggressively
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gRegor It even shows you like "Add an og:description. In the absence of it we used your meta description" (paraphrased), so like, great! haha
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ulhar4409 "pls don't use the globally recognized property pretty please use our equivalent in addition or instead thank you"
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valerieflynn I just finished adding RSS feed links into my website for it's blog. It's on 3-4 pages and in the side / footer of the WordPress website.
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valerieflynn Not sure I'm going to take the jump to Webmentions, but figured adding RSS feed links and a link to aboutfeeds.com was doable.
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valerieflynn Also figured out how to add social icons. That was nice to finally learn.
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IWDiscord <v​alerieflynn>
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IWDiscord <v​alerieflynn>
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IWDiscord <v​alerieflynn>
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valerieflynn My personal website is: https://valerieflynn.com/
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zacharykaiwrites Thanks gRegor I really appreciate it!
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[KevinMarks] @ulhar4409 when OGP was launched, FB said they'd talked to publishers, and their meta description tags were full of extra padding for SEO and they wanted a separate field to show up in Facebook.
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[KevinMarks] I made a page that has a different preview in every silo https://kevinmarks.com/partialsilos.html
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Loqi [preview] Decaying Silos as dead malls 2018-01-20
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ulhar4409 interesting
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legoshi004 👋👋
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Zegnat [KevinMarks]: when OGP was launched, it also felt like it might be maintained. There is even a way to spec extensions IIRC. But I am not sure I have ever seen a single update to it ... do you remember if there were ever any follow-up versions?
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[Murray] Well this was an interesting read, feels like it might be up your street [artlung] https://www.projectwallace.com/the-css-selection/2026
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[Murray] I also hadn't come across Project Wallace before, but was fun getting it to analyse my site; not sure I agree 100% with some of the maintenance tips, but apparently I still have some rogue `!important` rules I need to hunt down and remove 😄 Also looks like its visualisation for @layers would be helpful! https://www.projectwallace.com/
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[artlung] Thanks [Murray], yes this has been going around, added to the To-Study list. Thanks!
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[tantek] Yes that's right gRegor. No manifest, no problem 😄
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[tantek] Similarly with OGP/Twitter cards
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[tantek] What is add to Home Screen
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Loqi Add to home screen is a common mobile browser UI feature that allows a user to add a bookmark to the current page, to their mobile phone home screen https://indieweb.org/add_to_home_screen
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[tantek] Oh gosh that page is out of date a bit and too stubby to be useful beyond the dfn
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[tantek] What is icon
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Loqi An icon in the context of the indieweb typically refers to a home page icon for an indieweb site, or small decorative images to indicate types of posts https://indieweb.org/icon
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[tantek] Here you go re rel=icon etc what to use: https://indieweb.org/icon#How_to_Markup
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[tantek] lol irony of veganstraightedge's icon showing up in that link preview
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[tantek] (At least on Slack)
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[morgan] https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_link_rel_icon This was helpful too. After a quick brush up on it, I question the need for an .ico file more, but right just yet Id still include a favicon at the root, but its cool to see the rel=icon has apparently got more powerful
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[morgan] 83.91% arguably points towards keeping a favicon for the 16ish percent ?
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bbbhltz hey folks, got a quick question about hfeeds
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bbbhltz my little blog has a few h-feeds on it (like this one https://bobbyhiltz.com/archive.html) that parse when I use the preview tool https://monocle.p3k.io/preview
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bbbhltz And up until a few days (maybe weeks?) ago this page did too https://bobbyhiltz.com/bookmarks.html is there a way for me to see what is making this page hang? Besides rolling back to December or November I'm a bit lost
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[snarfed] hmm, http://pin13.net/mf2/?url=https://bobbyhiltz.com/bookmarks.html looks fine to me
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[snarfed] the h-feed does have a lot of items (160), but that's ok
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bbbhltz Ok. I guess I'll see if I can paginate it. Thanks!
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capjamesg pcarrier[d] Have you read anything on password-based key derivation in JS?
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capjamesg I'd like to read more about client-side encryption on the web.
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capjamesg My use case is a contacts app.
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pcarrier[d] I've built it for 1pw.me
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pcarrier[d] https://canary.discord.com/channels/866577279223595018/866577430886350869/1240369018724941875
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pcarrier[d] sorry that's a link to a message that reads "capjamesg[d] https://github.com/xmit-co/1pw.me/blob/main/src/app.tsx#L31C10-L50C12 for the password->seed derivation"
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capjamesg Oooh thank you!
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capjamesg window.crypto.subtle is a browser API?
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pcarrier[d] yup
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pcarrier[d] https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_crypto_subtle
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pcarrier[d] as a reminder, I built 1pw.me to store my 1pw main key securely behind a password. and 0pw.me to power 1pw.me
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capjamesg Thank you so much!
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capjamesg This is helpful.
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pcarrier[d] I use tweetnacl for the crypto. the APIs I rely on aren't designed for storing more than a few KBs
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pcarrier[d] if you want to go past that, you want to use something like AES or ChaCha20 to encrypt the body with a one-time key, then encrypt the one-time key with similar crypto
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pcarrier[d] as with all things security, get your stuff reviewed 😉 happy to do a pass on your design but I'm no substitute for an expert
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capjamesg Thank you! I will need to do a fair bit of reading before I get started on this.
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btrem A few months ago, I bemoaned the complexity of webdav/cardav, and the lack of something simpler. Like a json version of it. Turns out, there is a json version of vCard: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7095
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[schmarty] jacquard 🪡
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btrem Who knew? Does anyone know if there's any support among email clients? It doesn't appear to be supported by Thunderbird, but I can't be really sure. There's a site to request features in Mozilla projects. I'm seriously thinking of requesting support for a feed of jcards.
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btrem jcard is apparently used in something called RDAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Protocol I've never heard of that. Has anyone else?
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[tantek] I don't think the bespoke jcard/jcal efforts ever went anywhere
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[snarfed] for every successful standard, there are 10 (100?) that never went anywhere 🤷
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[tantek] part of the goal of defining a canonical mf2json was to avoid the need/overhead to have to specify a "j" version of every new/old spec
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aaronpk an RFC with a single author is often a sign that it hasn't been widely adopted in practice. not always, and the opposite can be true, but it's a clue
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[tantek] which in some way was an echo of the trend of having to specify an "x" version of every new/old spec at the time
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btrem aaronpk: good tip.
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[tantek] perhaps we'll get to the point where some folks decide to define a "y" version of every new/old spec
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[tantek] aaronpk, I find it more accurate to see if there's a test suite for an RFC or not as an indicator of whether it was taken seriously by anyone
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aaronpk the flip side of that is an RFC with 5+ authors can be a sign the RFC is too broad to be implementable directly and is more like a framework
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[tantek] right at some point it becomes credit farming
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aaronpk a test suite is a solid sign of it being "real", but the IETF doesn't publish test suites so you have to look elsewhere
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btrem Again, good tips.
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btrem The problem for me is that a lot of software doesn't support the current standards, at least not very well. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, it's incredibly difficult to supply an ical file using Drupal, and AFAICT there's no way to supply a webdav/cardav feed.
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btrem s/ical file/ical feed
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btrem And a web search for "read only contact subscribe" turns up plenty of requests for something simpler than carddav. So there appears, to me at least, to be a need.
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[tantek] my strawman for that is h-card + websub
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btrem yeahbut what email client supports it?
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btrem And if I file a feature request with Mozilla Thunderbird, which would be more likely to be accepted? I'd love nothing more than to have TBird (and other email programs/services) support h-card. It just doesn't seem likely.
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btrem By contrast, I think most programmers are at least familiar with json, so a json representation of vCards seems like an easier sell. And since mf2->json is already solved, it would be easy (I'd think) to get a client to read an h-feed of h-cards.
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btrem Hmm. In fairness, I don't know much about websub. I wonder if I could get TBird et.al. to consider that? Or am I in fantasy land? ;-)
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btrem The Wikipedia article on WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub includes a note at the top: "Not to be confused with WebVTT, a W3C standard for timed text." I don't see how those two could be confused!
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btrem What is websub?
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Loqi WebSub is an open standard (W3C Recommendation) notification-based protocol for web publishing and subscribing to streams and legacy feed files in real time, previously known as PubSubHubbub or PuSH, and briefly PubSub https://indieweb.org/WebSub
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btrem Ah, but I'd need to use a third party service to provide a hub. Is that correct?
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gRegor I started watching the CSS Day presentation by our own Ana Rodrigues, including a little "I <3 indie web" shout in the slides and an admonition to set up a personal site :) Refactoring CSS https://youtu.be/IufuVE2r3RA
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gRegor The "sub" part could be confused to mean subtitles
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btrem ?
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gRegor I was responding to > "Not to be confused with WebVTT, a W3C standard for timed text." I don't see how those two could be confused!
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btrem Oh, I just figured out what you were saying. Sorry.
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btrem Yes, sorry, our messages crossed. I knew what you were responding to, but didn't grok what you were saying. Too me a moment to realize "sub" as in "subtitle" which is what WebVTT is for. So yes, that note makes sense now.
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gRegor This may not be up to date, but looks like there's a few open source WebSub hubs: https://indieweb.org/WebSub#Hubs May not be strictly necessary for a minimal h-card subscribe setup. The address book software could poll it periodically, similar to feed readers that don't support WebSub
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btrem Light dawns on Marble Head. :-D
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gRegor no prob :)
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[tantek] btrem, one approach for encouraging Thunderbird adoption of WebSub would be as an enhancement of its existing feed reader functionality
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btrem What do you mean? Do you mean as an enhancement of its support for CardDAV?
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gRegor It supports subscribing to RSS feeds, so asking them to support WebSub-enabled feeds would be a nice enhancement.
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[tantek] ^ exactly that
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btrem ? Thunderbird supports subscribing to RSS feeds?
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gRegor Yep!
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[tantek] yes!~
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btrem TIL!
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gRegor And even chat like IRC and XMPP
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[tantek] point being, that's probably the most "obvious" reason to add WebSub client supporting code into Thunderbird, and once that code has landed, then it becomes easier to repurpose it for other use-cases!
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gRegor I've recently switched to Thunderbird, so learning more about it
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btrem Hah, I use TBird for IRC. Using it right now, in fact. :-)
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gRegor On the "Set up account" UI there's a "Feeds" option.
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btrem Never noticed it.
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gRegor Funnily enough, it subscribes OK to Tantek's feed for me, but isn't showing up. I need to file a bug report.
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gRegor Even when I go into debug, I see it's fetching the Atom feed contents fine, so it's something with parsing that into the messages Tbird displays
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btrem [tantek]: I don't know much about WebSub. But is it necessary for my use-case? gRegor seems to imply that it is not.
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btrem IOW, maybe I should simply request that TBird support RSS but for vCards instead of web pages. As I said, I don't know much about this, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.
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gRegor Just to be clear, that message was hypothetical and I'm not sure. WebSub would be nice to get updates very quickly pushed into the address book, but it seems like something that could just poll on a regular basis too.
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gRegor I am actually now curious about a Tbird extension that would pull in h-cards from a list into the address book.
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btrem There is no such extension. I looked. ;-)
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btrem I'm pretty sure that CardDAV subs work that way. No push, just a periodical poll. So I'd think that would make more sense to a TBird dev. Maybe WebSub would be nice, but it probably wouldn't be necessary.
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btrem What would an RSS feed of contacts look like? I think that's the question. It'd have to be something that Thunderbird understands. I did some research a few weeks ago, and AFAICT, it uses SQLite for it's contact database. But I wonder if that's only for its own internal contacts.
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btrem That is to say, given a CardDAV subscription, does Thunderbird read the vCards and insert them into its database?
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ulhar4409 websub requires an http server that can provide a callback, which probably wouldn't be a good fit to build into an on-device app
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gRegor Yes, I subscribe to my Google Contacts via CardDAV in Tbird
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gRegor No idea how it works under the hood, nor familiar with CardDAV :)
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btrem CarDAV is a damn nightmare to understand. But for me, the question is not how CardDAV works, but rather how does Thunderbird deal with the results of a CardDAV sub? Does it cache the results and use that when addressing emails? Or does it insert them into the database? If it's the latter, than one has to think about the format of an RSS feed of contacts. What would be the easiest to insert into an SQLite db?
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btrem Anyone know any Thunderbird devs? ;-)
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gRegor Tbird supports multiple Address Books. I created a new one, selected the CardDav URL, entered the specific URL I found from some searching (later learned: just enter your full gmail address), go through OAuth with Google, then it synchronizes periodically (both ways IME).
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gRegor And yes, that address book is used for addressing new messages
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btrem Yes to all that. I subscribe to my Apple address book in a similar way.
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gRegor I don't understand the questions I guess. Haven't you excperienced Tbird using that address book when addressing messages?
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btrem Yes.
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btrem It could be me who's confused. When Thunderbird subscribes to an Apple or GMail CardDAV url, what does it do with the results? If it just caches them, then it's probably a tougher sell to get Mozilla to add support for RSS/contacts. But if it inserts them into its SQLite database, then the thing is (I'd think) to have a format that would make the process easy.
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gRegor Ah gotcha
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btrem I suppose either way, one would have to have a means of translating an RSS feed of contacts into something that's easy to insert into a database. Honestly, that's why I've been fixated (maybe too strong a word, but you get my drift) on json. Because I think there's a json-to-sqlite conversion.
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gRegor I imagine it's in a database
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btrem Me too.
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btrem I think I need to figure out a bit more about RSS. I've only used it rarely, on very old and now defunct projects, and never for myself that I can recall. So it's a bit of a black box, and I need to figure what is and is not possible.
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gRegor Probably not? CardDAV is already XML. I thought the concept was subscribing to a page of h-cards
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btrem It's subscribing to *anything* that is easy to publish. Which excludes CardDAV. But does not necessarily exclude json or jcard or...
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btrem And I think that CardDAV is only sorta XML. AFAICT, a CardDAV response is XML followed by vCards, in some kind of bastard format. All very complicated and confusing.
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btrem But I see your point. It seems like I'm going around in circles. jCard -> WebSub -> RSS -> json -> jCard. :-(
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Loqi *sniff*
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[tantek] What is JSONFeed
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Loqi JSON Feed is a feed file in JSON format, created by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons https://indieweb.org/jsonfeed
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