W3C First Public Working Draft for Contacts API Specification

Members of the W3C Device APIs and Policy Working Group have publisheda First Public Working Draft for "The Contacts API" specification. Itdefines an API that provides access to a user's unified address book.
The API has been designed to meet requirements and use cases specifiedin the draft. Use cases: (1) Upload a set of contact details to a user'ssocial network; (2) Download a set of contact details from a user'ssocial network; (3) A user would like to keep their work address bookand personal address book seperate; (4) A user maintains a singleunified address book but would like to maintain groups of contactswithin that address book; (5) Use a web interface to manage contactdetails on both the user's device and the web; (6) A user would like toexport contacts from the one address book store and import them toanother address book store; (7) A user would like to be notified whenfriends have a birthday coming up; (8) A user would like his/hercontacts to update their own contact details via a mediating WebApplication and sync any changes to their current address book.

Details: "The Contacts API defines a high-level interface to provideaccess to the user's unified contact information, such as names,addresses and other contact information. The API itself is agnostic ofany underlying address book sources and data formats... The Contactsinterface exposes a database collecting contacts information, suchthat they may be created, found, read, updated, and deleted. Multipleaddress books, taken from different sources, can be represented withinthis unified address book interface...

The programmatic styles of the Contacts API and Geolocation API are verysimilar and because they both have the the same implied user experiencewithin the same implied User Agent the general security and privacyconsiderations of both APIs should remain common. The ability to alignthe security and privacy considerations of the Geolocation API withDAP APIs is important for the potential future benefit of making anysecurity and privacy mechanisms developed within the DAP WG applicableto the Geolocation API at some point in its own ongoing development...A conforming implementation of this specification must provide amechanism that protects the user's privacy and this mechanism shouldensure that no contact information is creatable, retrivable, updateableor removable without the user's express permission... More Info