RE: Name relationships in vCard 3.0

["Roland H. Alden" <ralden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

FN is an expression of how the person would "commonly" write their name without structure; such as when addressing an envelope or printing the name on a business card.

N imposes a type of "universal" structure with notions such as "Family" or "Given" etc. which may or may not map into an arbitrary cultural context. N is intended to "pre-structure" the name into fields which might be useful for searching, sorting, etc. and eliminate the need for any heuristic processing on the FN field to extract that information.

Without question the two attributes denote the same person :)




> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-imc-vcard@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-imc-vcard@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Misha Wolf
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 6:44 AM
> To: Goh Siew Yong; Germán M. Rivera; Jeff Parrish; imc-vcard@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Name relationships in vCard 3.0
> 
> 
> > As far as I know, N & FN should mean the same thing. 
> 
> Indeed.  Now all we have to decide is what we mean by "mean".
> 
> Misha
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-imc-vcard@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-imc-vcard@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Goh Siew Yong
> Sent: 09 September 2004 13:00
> To: Misha Wolf; Germán M. Rivera; Jeff Parrish; imc-vcard@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Name relationships in vCard 3.0
> 
> 
> 
> Yes I guess you can. But you never know how the parser or 
> receiving appl.
> will interpret them. Though syntactically it will not cause 
> any problem.
> Just like you can enter anything say Jane in the field for 
> first name,Tan for family name for a form in the ab 
> application. And then a completely different thing say Peter 
> Brown for full name field. 
> 
> As far as I know, N & FN should mean the same thing. 
> 
> As specified in RF2426:
> N type requires the text to be in the  format following the 
> semantics of X.520 Common Name attribute.
> While FN type need to be a structured text value. Each 
> component can have multiple values. The components in the 
> structure has to be of the following sequence : Family Name, 
> Given Name, Additional Names, Honorific Prefix, and Honorific 
> suffixes. These components are separated by semi-colon. 
> Individual text can also includes multiple text separated by 
> commas. This type is based on the semantics of X.520 
> individual name attributes.
> 
> The example given in the RFC was
> FN:Mr. John Q. Public\, Esq.
> N:Public;John;Qinlan;Mr.;Esq
> 
> 
> 
> 
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