Re: vCard XML DTD comments 02

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

I'll let others who are more serious XML hackers reply to your XML-specific
questions.

>1.   I am interested in creating French and English vCards.  The DTD
>seems to allow this by specifying the 'encoding' attribute with a value
>of "UTF-8" for the DTD.  However, if we want to have a vCard in Chinese
>what do we do?

The same thing: use UTF-8. It encodes Chinese just fine.

>  Tokens such as "VOICE" and "MSG" will not be vary
>understandable in China.  I think we need a separate DTD for each
>language.

The element names are not supposed to be human-parsable. The DTD is for XML
parsers. This is true for all XML DTDs, regardless of the human language
that the originator wrote them in.

>4. The "lang" attribute is specified for many of the vCard elements.
>This is not pragmatic.  It should only be an attribute of the vCard
>element itself, and should apply to the whole card.  I do not want cards
>that are half French and half English.  I want a French business card
>and an English business card, and I will give the appropriate one out
>depending on the context.

I disagree here. There are many cases where people want to have multiple
languages in a single card. For instance, one might want to make comments
in more than one language. Or, your company name might be in Japanese and
your personal name in Chinese. These scenarios are quite common.

>9.  The element "sort-string" is not needed.  It should be deleted.

There have been many requests for this from various Asian countries.

Again, I hope others will respond to your other comments.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium