I’ve been doing some programming lately, and as such I’ve been thinking creatively and programmatically. Today, I picked up the yellow pages to look for a business. I got so frustrated, I just went online to Sprint Yellow Pages and searched for what I was looking for and it gave me several categories. Big deal, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just do this with everyone and everything? Now I don’t mean EVERYTHING, but it would be nice to have a way to lookup a business’s information, including phone number, address, web page….whatever else. As it turns out, they have a standard for this already. They’re called vCards.

vCards hold all kinds of important information. Beyond what I listed above, they contain contact e-mail, security keys (for e-mail encryption and digital signatures), …some…other…things….and it’s extensable too. For instance, businesses could add an extra field for store hours. How nice would that be? VERY.

So here’s my idea. Embed vCards into webpages, similar to favicons and RSS Feeds using a <link> tag similar to the following:

I propose using a tag such as:

or even better would to just to embed the vCard into XHTML using an XML namespace using RDF as explained by W3C, right here.

The benefits of this are obvious. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! could index this data providing an easy to use directory. Back in the day….waaaaay back in the day, websites used to be registered in a directory much like a phone book. Each year a copy of this would be published and distributed. Then DNS fixed that problem because you didn’t need to lookup the IP address of the webpages you wanted to visit anymore. I find phone numbers rather archaic, myself. Maybe once IPv6 and VoIP take off, instead of phone numbers, we’ll use IP addresses to make voice calls. Which would be wonderful, with the exception of DNS is kinda archaic in itself. Still a great standard, I won’t argue. I just don’t think it’s up to the task of maintaining directory info for websites, phone numbers (IPs), e-mails, and all that other crap. That’s where, of course, you could use a vCard to just dial a name, the application or phone would lookup the name in the vCard, then dial. You never see the IP address and you never need to.

There are obvious abuses of this too, I think. For example, this would be a rather easy way to harvest spam addresses, both e-mail and fax. I can’t think of any obvious ways to prevent that right now though. Although, GPG/PGP keyservers contain a large database of e-mail addresses and public keys. These don’t appear to be targets for spam harvesters, however. Perhaps a database for vCards could be maintained somewhere similarly. I don’t have all the answers, just a dream of a unified model of information flow. Especially regarding directory lookups, because I hate the phone book. You never know what word they list something under.

Peace.