Re: vCard3.0 and vCal2.0

[Chris Page <page@xxxxxxxx>]

On Friday, August 16, 2002, at 02:12  AM, Priyantha wrote:

> The CHARSET tag is very usefull in Multilanguage capable 
> developments...

But it has been eliminated in vCard 3, which is really meant for 
embedding in MIME, where the MIME Content header provides the 
character encoding. Unfortunately, the standard doesn't define any 
particular file format. If you just put a vCard into a file and 
give it a "vcf" extension, there's no way to know the encoding for 
certain.

The best you can hope for is to use a heuristic to guess. Most 
existing vCards were written by a Windows program that uses the 
default Windows encoding, and a lot of readers expect this, so 
unfortunately a lot of the vCard writers out there are oblivious to 
this fact (even with vCard 2, they often omitted the CHARSET tag). 
I recommend that everyone begin writing vCard files using Unicode 
UTF-16. It is then fairly safe to assume that if you see a byte 
order mark, or the VCARD header with zeroes every other byte, then 
it's Unicode.

The standard really needs to be extended with a definition for one 
or more file formats, probably with new file extensions (and file 
types for HFS volumes) to eliminate conflicts with existing files.

--
Chris Page - Mac OS Lead, Palm Desktop - Palm, Inc.

 The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
 is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
 We cause accidents.                            -- Nathaniel Borenstein