Andy Powell wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Phil Barker wrote:
>
>
>>Phil Barker wrote:
...
>>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.
OK, we'll see if anyone objects to the extra few lines.
> 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.
>
Given the state of my Palm address book after exchanging vCards with
Mozilla, I wish they were stricter.
After some consideration of Chris's original message, I think I would be
happier with
<![CDATA[BEGIN:VCARD
FN:None
N:None
ORG:WH Smith
NOTE:objectClass\: organization
VERSION:3.0
END:VCARD]]>
Since I think Chris's suggestion mis-uses both N's additional names and FN,
and as Andy has pointed out there's no need to put incorrect information
there. I'm not sure "None", is the right value, but is the one recommended
in CanCore, and I don't see much point in choosing a more appropriate term
(such as "not applicable") just to ignore it.
Phil
--
Phil Barker Learning Technology Adviser
ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
Tel: 0131 451 3278 Fax: 0131 451 3327
Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/
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