Mandatory N and FN in version 3

[Phil Barker <philb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all, I wonder if you can help a group of people interested in 
educational metadata? In short, how can we get around providing N and FN 
values when creating vCards for organizations?

vCard version 3.0 is mandated by the IEEE Learning Object Metadata 
standard, which we use to describe contributers to an educational 
resource (the authors, publishers etc.). The problem is that in many 
cases these contributors are corporate entities or organizations, and 
the vCard 3.0 spec, being intended for people, mandates we provide N and 
FN values.

We seem to have three broad options:

1) ignore the fact that vCard 3.0 mandates N and FN and leave them out 
all together

2) Put in empty values i.e.:
FN
N;;;;

3) Put in some values which make sense, e.g. for "Some Publisher, Inc." 
we would have
FN Some Publisher\, Inc.
N none
Which would provide a suitable "display name" in FN and something in N.

My concern is the effect that each of these might have on applications 
which receive such a vCard and any processing tools (perl / PHP modules 
etc) which might be used to parse and when building an application. (I'm 
especially concerned about the latter.)

So, if you know of any problems which might be caused by any of these 
approaches, I would be grateful if you let me know.

Many thanks, and, if you've read this far, please excuse the verbose email!

Phil.


--
Phil Barker                            Learning Technology Adviser
      ICBL, School of Mathematics and Computer Science
      Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
      Tel: work - 0131 451 3278    home - 0131 221 1352
      Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/