[uf-discuss] hCard: Quick question about nicknames

[Ciaran McNulty]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Michael Smethurst
<Michael.Smethurst at bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> For now I'm marking them all up with class="nickname". Is this stretching
> the semantics of nickname too much?
>
> Should I just be POSH and use class="pseudonym"?

Even if you use class="pseudonym" you still need to decide whether to
populate N or NICKNAME.

What I mean is you either say George Eliot is given-name + family-name
or a nickname, regardless of any extra POSH semantics you'd care to
add.

The vCard RFC seems remarkably unenlightening about the semantics of
the different fields:

" Type special note: The nickname is the descriptive name given instead
   of or in addition to the one belonging to a person, place, or thing.
   It can also be used to specify a familiar form of a proper name
   specified by the FN or N types.

   Type example:

        NICKNAME:Robbie

        NICKNAME:Jim,Jimmie
"

Based on the two examples I'd lean towards markup up pseudonyms that
are structurally formatted like names as names, with everything else
as nickname, i.e.:

George Eliot = given-name, family-name with a pseudonym wrapper
El Greco = nickname

However I don't think there's any hard-and-fast rule about it.

-Ciaran McNulty