Re: [VCARDDAV] Review of draft-fukuda-vcarddav-phonetic-transcription-00.txt

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 9/12/13 9:43 AM, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
> Hi Gren,
>
> --On September 12, 2013 at 3:17:13 PM +0100 Gren Elliot 
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>> Using TYPE instead of VALUE might be better.  VALUE represents a data
>>> type, which can be applied to other properties.  These settings are
>>> specific to this property alone.
>>>
>>> PHONETIC-FULL-NAME;TYPE=IPA-X-SAMPA:/"sUSi/
>>> PHONETIC-FULL-NAME;TYPE=X-FURIGANA:sushi
>>>
>>
>> I agree.  I think that makes more sense.
>
> Actually I would argue that the values should all have a corresponding 
> media type associated with them (MIME type) and then the MEDIATYPE 
> property parameter would be a better choice:
>
> PHONETIC-FULL-NAME;MEDIATYPE=text/ipa; option=x-sampa:/"sUSi/
> PHONETIC-FULL-NAME;MEDIATYPE=text/x-furigana:sushi
>
> Ideally we want these "types" registered for interoperability.

Cyrus,

Fukuda-san asked whether Barry or I would be interested in sponsoring 
this document, so I had a read of it. I noticed the use of MEDIATYPE and 
found your message in the archive.

Please explain how MEDIATYPE is in any way correct for this. 6350 says:

    The MEDIATYPE parameter is used with properties whose value is a URI.
    Its use is OPTIONAL.  It provides a hint to the vCard consumer
    application about the media type [RFC2046] of the resource identified
    by the URI.

That's not even close to what this is. PHONETIC-NAME (as it currently is 
called) is a string that represents the phonetic pronunciation of the 
name. The string might be in a particular charset, but the string is 
certainly not going to change media type; it's always going to be 
"text/plain". I don't understand what "text/ipa" or "text/x-furigana" 
could possibly mean.

Now, I don't really understand why this thing needs a "type" anyway. If 
the string contains characters from the Hiragana range, it's Hirigana, 
and if it has characters from the IPA symbols range, it's IPA. In fact, 
adding a type that might disagree with the contents of the string seems 
problematic. And I think I agree with Simon that this should really be a 
property like "SORT-AS" that is added to a name property and simply 
contains the pronunciation, for example:

    FN;PHONETIC-NAME="<<blahblah>>:Rene van der Harten

But I am at a loss as to why MEDIATYPE makes any sense in this context. 
Can you explain?

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - [phone]