Re: Four Questions to Resolve VCard Issue on Ordering/Unordering

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>>
>> It seems there is an ordering of suffixes and prefixes in this
>> example in the Spec, and a restriction of cardinality=1 for family
>> name and given-name.
>
> In which spec? There can be many ordered family names in Spain.
>
As given by the vCard spec [1] in the following example:

"N:Public;John;Quinlan;Mr.;Esq." and
"N:Stevenson;John;Philip,Paul;Dr.;Jr.,M.D.,A.C.P"

and by the following sentence: "The structured type value corresponds,
in sequence, to the Family Name, Given Name, Additional Names, Honorific
Prefixes, and Honorific Suffixes."

Now I admit this does present problems for Spanish naming conventions,
where there are usually two given names and two family names. However,
there is usually some sort of ordering, so I assume if one takes given
name and family name simply to place-holders in an ordering (the first
and last respectively, although oddly enough vCard presents the list as
(last, first, rest...), then it's fine. I do think this problem is
endemic to most languages, but if you want a single ordered list of
names you have to do something.

Also, I do think we inherit this problem from vCard, and I am loathe to
start "fixing" vCard, because if we do we cannot round-trip easily from
vCard/RDF to vCard, which is one of our design goals.


[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/rfc2426#sec3.1.2


>>
>> So, please answer the question is detail (as in, 1) "yes" 2) "no" 3)
>> "no" 4) "yes") with any supporting comments or examples, and as soon
>> as I get something resembling consensus (by end of the day hopefully,
>> since this is such an active topic), I will hit republish button on
>> the spec.
>
> KUTGW!
> Tim
>
>


-- 
		-harry

Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh 
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426

Received on Friday, 27 July 2007 01:50:21 UTC