Re: [VCARDDAV] vCard XML

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi Simon,

--On March 5, 2010 4:09:36 PM -0500 Simon Perreault 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>> 3) All XML elements in the "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:vcard-4.0" namespace
>> must be mapped to their vCard equivalents (component, property,
>> parameter).
>
>> (3) is wrong right now in that the vCard XML: property as defined allows
>> for normal vCard properties to remain encoded as XML in the vCard itself
>> as shown in the example in Section 5. I think this issue was discussed
>> before (at a meeting or on the list) and consensus was to change that to
>> follow what is proposed for iCalendar.
>
> I don't recall any discussion on this issue. Personally I don't care, but
> a priori I would tend to favour flexibility.
>
> Why is it important that this cannot be written?
>
> XML:<email><text>[e-mail]</text></email>

A vCard parser seeing this will treat it as an opaque value. vCard parsers 
should not be expected to parse XML into vCard properties - that is the 
duty of the XML<->vCard converter.

>> Also, I think we should
>> prefix/suffix schema elements with "property-", "param", "value-" as we
>> did in iCalendar. Again that is important to avoid a clash of names
>> (e.g. if the same name is used for a property and parameter in vCard).
>
> I think we should forbid name clashes completely in vCard. I'll add that
> to the vCard base spec, and then we don't need the prefixes anymore.
>
> We could even remove the <parameters> element now that clashes are not an
> issue.

I don't think we should forbid the use of the same name in a property, 
parameter or value. Its seems somewhat unfair to say we can't have a DATE 
property or parameter now given that the only concern is how the XML schema 
is written (and its really just a stylistic feature of the schema - after 
all there is nothing that requires the relaxNG definitions to use names 
that match their vCard equivalents - the names of elements have to match of 
course).

>> (8) The current vCard spec does use elements for enumerated types, e.g.:
>>
>> element type {
>> element work { empty }?,
>> element home { empty }?,
>> element media { \text }?
>> }
>>
>> In the iCalendar spec we did things like:
>>
>> roleparam = element role {
>> "CHAIR" |
>> "REQ-PARTICIPANT" |
>> "OPT-PARTICIPANT" |
>> "NON-PARTICIPANT"
>> }
>>
>> Given that parameter values are text and in vCard are allowed to contain
>> characters that are possibly disallowed as XML element names (e.g. "<"
>> or ">" !!) I think we need to make these enumerations text values and
>> not XML elements.
>
> Done. (There was consensus on this issue in Hiroshima.)

Thanks.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo