Structured Types

[Chris Hubick <chrish@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

The Mime-Dir RFC, sec 5.8.2, says:

> However, it should be noted that some value types
> support encoding multiple values in a single content line by
> separating the values with a comma ",".

The vCard RFC, sec 3.1.2 "N Type Definition" (and others) says:

> Type special note: The structured type value corresponds, in
> sequence, to the Family Name, Given Name, Additional Names, Honorific
> Prefixes, and Honorific Suffixes. The text components are separated
> by the SEMI-COLON character (ASCII decimal 59). Individual text
> components can include multiple text values (e.g., multiple
> Additional Names) separated by the COMMA character.

Don't the vCard structured types violate the Mime-Dir rules by
separating components using semi-colons instead of commas??

Ie: given the following example:

N:Stevenson;John;Philip,Paul;Dr.;Jr.,M.D.,A.C.P.

Wouldn't a generic Mime-Dir parser, not recognizing any special
significance for the semi-colon, simply see unescaped commas and thus
break this string into a list with four values:

- "Stevenson;John;Philip"
- "Paul;Dr.;Jr."
- "M.D."
- "A.C.P."

Which isn't really what you want at all :(

As a Mime-Dir profile, one would think vCard syntactic structures would
fit within the framework provided by Mime-Dir.  I would think a better
choice, from a Mime-Dir profile perspective, would have been to use
commas to separate the list of structural text components - Family Name,
Given Name, etc, and then introduce the semi-colons to separate multiple
values within those.

Or am I missing something?

-- 
Chris Hubick
mailto:chrish@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
mailto:chris@xxxxxxxxxx
http://adlib.athabascau.ca/~hubick/
http://www.hubick.com/


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