Re: Comment to vCard MIME

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

At 6:06 PM -0700 9/25/97, Yu Kitayama (81-462-73-6300) wrote:
>1. We intend to use SOUND for pronunciation of names, addresses in text
>format. The Draft says "Type value: The default is binary. It may also
>be reset to url." The original vCard spec allows the use of SOUND for
>text, and we like to confirm that this is true. Since it is not always
>easy to know the pronunciation of names in Kanji, it is a Japanese
>custom to have pronunciation fields for name and address in PIM
>applications.

This is still true for vCard 2.1.

>2. It is not clear what properties are mandatory. The original vCard
>spec is clear on that 'N' and 'VERSION' are mandatory. The Internet
>Draft for "vCard Scheme for Use in LDAPv3" says that 'Formatted Name'
>which corresponds to 'FN' is mandatory. All these three specs should be
>consistent.

In fact, the Internet Draft is the result of discussions in the IETF ASID
Working Group. There, people came up with different ideas than what are in
vCard 2.1. When the ASID WG fininshes its work, IMC will separately name it
version 3.0 of vCard, so there will definitely be differences between it
and version 2.1.

>3. We do not understand why VALUE parameter is necessary.

Without it, you would not know if the property value was just some text, or
a pointer to an outside entity. The VALUE parameter makes it so that the
interpreting program does not have to "guess" if the property value is a
URL or a CID: it will automatically know that.

>4. The Draft says that for AGENT type value, "It may be reset to text
>or url". However, the BNF in the Draft does not support this.

The author of the Draft, Frank Dawson, can fix this.

>5. Typo or like.
>
>   Section 2: Predefined MIME Directory used; PROFILE appear twice.
>   Section 4.1.3: Type example; PHOTO;VALUE=url:=http:....
>                  What is the second '='?
>   The BNF: '8bit' is missing for 'value' definition.

Thank you for your careful reading of the draft! After reading something a
dozen times, it is easy to miss things.

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium