Re: [VCARDDAV] [Technical Errata Reported] RFC6350 (7856)

[Robert Stepanek <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2024, at 11:30 AM, Ryan Castellucci wrote:
> My perspective is that "assigned sex" is problematic in very similar 
> ways to "biological sex".

Understood, thanks for pointing that out.

> I had a look, my comment on GRAMGENDER would be that consideration 
> should be given to cases where not all languages have the specified 
> default grammatical gender. In the neutral case, some people like to 
> have this handled by alternating, others handle it with a fallback.

The GRAMGENDER property can be set multiple times in the vCard having LANG parameters for the respective language. If there's a GRAMGENDER property without a LANG parameter that might be the fallback, but applications might know better for a particular user or contact.

> I'm  sure there are other cases, it would probably be good to speak with some 
> people who regularly have to deal with that issue.

GRAMGENDER and PRONOUNS is the result of having talked to both contact application developers and users that showed interested in this topic.

> Regarding the PRONOUNS proposal, some guidance for implementers would be 
> helpful.
> 
> Is the intended use of this field for simple display to humans, or is it 
> intended to also be usable in templates for messages like "It's their 
> birthday today!"? Where does "their" come from if the specified pronouns 
> are "they/them"?
> The now defunct site pronoun.is provides some examples:
> 
> https://github.com/witch-house/pronoun.is
> 
> https://github.com/witch-house/pronoun.is/blob/master/resources/pronouns.tab
> 
> a supported syntax was "they/.../themself", as an example.

We deliberately specified PRONOUNS as an unstructured free-text value, in contrast to us enforcing any structure that's likely to miss some needs. We expect it to mainly be useful for human display but implementations might also infer structure from the value however they deem reasonable.

The PRONOUNS property also is deliberately close to what we've seen in proprietary APIs, such as the "addressMeAs" field in Google's People API. Should someone want to come up with a JSContact extension for structured pronouns we'll be happy to hear about it!

> I would also advise specifying what it means (or if it is invalid) to 
> assign the same PERF value to multiple entries.

We prefer not to. Applications or services might have better context what to do in that case. vCard in general does not specify how to resolve PREF conflicts.