- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2011 14:56:23 +0200
- To: public-i18n-core@w3.org
- Cc: public-device-apis@w3.org
Dear I18N WG, this is just a personal comment. On Jul 4, 2011, at 21:50 , Internationalization Core Working Group Issue Tracker wrote: > The fields defined in the ContactName interface do not include fields for "pronunciation" (also called variously "furigana", "reading", or "phonetic"). These fields are necessary to support East Asian cultures and names, since the pronunciation information is important for both sorting/organizing names (Chinese and Japanese ideographs do not contain this information directly). > > Many vendors support this via proprietary X- extension fields. Lack of interchange for these fields represents a significant barrier for global name catalogs. > > Please add optional pronunciation fields for at least the family and given name fields. We are aware that this is indeed a problem, but we are dependent on the interchange formats in order to expose this. Our API exposes an interoperable subset of existing interchange formats. If we were to add fields that are not available there, these fields would always be null (which is less than useful). If there is a reliably specified way of making this available at least some of the time then it's something that we can certainly consider, but barring that please understand that this API is not expecting to have any control over how information is stored in the underlying backend. I'm somewhat shocked that the existing standards have managed to go through multiple revisions without adding this, is that really the case? I looked through vCard 4.0 and all I found was "SOUND" which is a nice thought but not enough. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 12:56:47 UTC