30621 - Address book XML table export

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement, P3)

Description

[shwag]

Allow the address book to be exportable to a standard XML file that other
programs could parse.

Comment 1

[hangas]

Moving to helpwanted list.

Comment 2

[timeless]

Moving to mozilla.org

Comment 3

[J Luh]

See also bug 52045

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

.

Comment 5

[Hakon]

What about exporting to a html file, similar to "print address book"?
That would be seen as a complement to this.

Comment 6

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 7

[Guillaume Coté]

Is there any difference between this rfe and bug 117231?

Comment 8

[Guillaume Coté]

Is there any difference between this rfe and bug 117231?

Comment 9

[Bogdan Stroe]

*** Bug 117231 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Sean M. Burke]

As an aside, I'll note that XML and HTML, would lack the i18n problems of the current export formats:

* .csv and .tab have no way of declaring their encoding; one simply has to assume they're UTF8 (and to coerce one's tools into that assumption)

* .ldif (at least as Thunderbird implements it) encodes nonUSascii characters in some format that is not human readable, and is less than obvious how to decode.  For example, my pal Audrey's entry, "Audrey Tang (唐鳳)", ends up as:
dn:: Y249QXVkcmV5IFRhbmcgKOWUkOmzsyksbWFpbD1hdWRyZXl0QGF1ZHJleXQub3Jn
Compare this to a plain-USascii name which needs (and gets) no encoding:
dn: cn=Damian Conway,mail=[e-mail]

XML and HTML would be quite helpful here, since both explicitly declare the document encoding; or at least could escape nonUSascii characters with the straightforward 〹 format.

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

For XML, I don't think it's very supported to import/export XML. If anything, that format would be RDF (and FOAF). Exporting as JSON-LD would be more interesting (and that could in turn be converted to RDF if needed.)