On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Phil Barker wrote:
> Phil Barker wrote:
>
> > Andy Powell wrote:
> >
> >> Oh... and, since we are now firmly talking about a LOM-specific
> >> profile of
> >> vCard, I guess we can forget about the fact that VERSION is mandatory?
> >>
> >
> > This would be a syntactic matter rather whereas the bending of N is
> > semantic. As such there is a chance that whatever vCard parser being used
> > by an application reading a LOM record may not accept the vCard (I suspect
> > the vCard parser may well be more generic in intent than working on vCards
> > in LOM records). Otherwise, why not forget about the fact that N is
> > mandatory?
> >
>
> doh, leaving out N (and FN) was exactly what Andy suggested before making
> this point. Sorry, I read too many vCards yesterday morning.
>
> Well, I thought that the only advantage of using vCards was that they were
> widely used for applications other than the LOM, and so there's a chance of
> picking up a parser written for a more generic application and plugging it
> into your LOM application. Using a LOM-specific profile can only reduce the
> likelihood of this happening.
Well I'd be happy to live with the verbosity of...
<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
FN:WH Smith
N:;;WH Smith
ORG:WH Smith
NOTE:objectClass\: organization
VERSION:3.0
END:VCARD]]>
if that's the general view. However, I don't think this is necessary and
I find it hard to believe that there are vCard parsers out there that will
reject vCards because they have missing mandatory fields - because, as in
the current discussion about the UK LOM Core, I suspect that most people
don't write software that interprets 'mandatory' as really meaning
'mandatory'! :-). If you do, you'll end up throwing too much away.
Andy
--
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http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
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ECDL 2004, Bath, UK - 12-17 Sept 2004 - http://www.ecdl2004.org/
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