- From: Simon Perreault <simon.perreault@viagenie.ca>
- Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:59:19 -0400
- To: jsmarr@stanfordalumni.org
- CC: Joseph Smarr <jsmarr@gmail.com>, Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org>, public-contacts-coord@w3.org
(Just trying to reply to the technical points concerning vCard...)
On 2010-09-08 12:12, Joseph Smarr wrote:
> For instance, compare the
> representations of gender in Portable Contacts and the proposed vCard XML:
>
> <gender>male</gender>
>
> vs.
>
> <sex><integer>1</integer></sex>
>
>
> I think it's hard to argue that the first version (PoCo) is far more
> readable and semantically clear.
more readable: Agreed, but who cares? Users are not going to see this.
more semantically clear: Disagree, the semantics of vCard are very well
defined.
Note that we had exactly <gender>male</gender> at the beginning and
gradually changed it to what we have now, for two reasons:
1. It's better to follow standards. In this case, ISO 5218 applies. It
says that the term "sex" is preferred, and defines the applicable
values. Standards are good.
2. Usage of the <integer> element provides two advantages (which are not
related to the sex property in particular, but apply at large):
- It allows using parameter elements which would be siblings of the
value text-node otherwise, making the parser much simpler.
- It facilitates extensibility using XML namespaces.
> Similarly, we chose to name the list of mailing address fields
> "addresses" instead of vCard's anachronistic "adr"
Again, why should anyone care about the names of the elements? Users are
not going to see this.
> and we dropped the
> "post-office box" and "extended address" sub-fields, which in practice
> are ill-defined and used by none of the major address book providers
> we're aware of, preferring instead a single "streetAddress" multi-line
> field, which is what almost everyone implements anyway and sticks in the
> third sub-field of adr ("street address").
This is also available in vCard. ADR is for formatted addresses whereas
LABEL is for unformatted addresses.
> vCard does not seem to have added
> many (if any) social networking fields.
Not in vCard *core*. A separate RFC will address this. The draft is here:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-george-vcarddav-vcard-extension-02
Simon
--
NAT64/DNS64 open-source --> http://ecdysis.viagenie.ca
STUN/TURN server --> http://numb.viagenie.ca
vCard 4.0 --> http://www.vcarddav.org
Received on Wednesday, 8 September 2010 16:59:48 UTC