hCard Resolved Issues

See hcard-issues for unresolved issues.

closed issues

Resolved issues that have no further actions to take.

2007

2007-01-26 raised by [[User::JamesCraig|JamesCraig]].
1. Proposal to use the class attribute for qname prefixed type values (and others such as dtstart values), AKA meta classes.

Home (preferred): +1.415.555.1212 Casa (preferido): +1.415.555.1212

1. - REJECTED DUPLICATE ETC. Class attributes for type values was tried and rejected and in addition, qnames-considered-harmful.
  - Clarified proposal, leaving REJECTED.

2007-05-08 raised by Tantek as a result of a message from Andy Mabbett on microformats-new
1. How do you distinguish a place vs. an organization hCard, both from the perspective of a publisher (author) wishing to express the particular semantic, and from the perspective of a parser (developer) wishing to discern the difference? This is different from the 2006-12-15 issue on semantic specificity because this issue is *specifically* about place vs. org, rather than conflating that with person.
2. Note: mailing list post cited in 2006-12-15 issue is quite clear; it says "when a spider finds an hCard, it can't tell if it is a person, company, organization, or place.".
  - DUPLICATE. See 2006-12-15 issue.

resolved issues

Issues that are resolved but may have outstanding to-do items. As issues are resolved, they will be moved from the Issues list to this section.

2005

2005-06-21 raised by Hixie
1. Issue H-1: This specification is lacking a user agent conformance section. There's basically nothing that says how hCards must be parsed, how to handle errors, and so forth. Is it defined in terms of the DOM? Is it defined in terms of a serialisation? How do you handle unexpected content or missing content?
  - A: ACCEPTED RESOLVED. See hcard-parsing for how hCards must be parsed. For errors/unexpected content/missing content, please provide specific examples.

2005-06-30 raised by Jack L. Wolfgang II. Please feel free to move these to the FAQs if they are better suited there.
1. Handling middle names and suffixes: How does one handle middle initials/names in the hCard format and suffixes that are not honorific suffixes (e.g. Jr., Sr., II, III, etc. as opposed to Ph.D., Esq., M.D., etc.)?
 - A: ACCEPTED FAQ. By Brian Suda (2005-11-08 updated by Tantek; 2006-11-16 updated by Andy Mabbett) hCard is based of the RFC2426 spec. I you want to use a middle initial it can be expanded using the abbr element. <abbr title="[MiddleName]" class="additional-name">M</abbr>. Honorific Suffixes in the RFC include Jr., Esq. and other inherited suffixes, so I would just use <abbr class="honorific-suffix" title="Junior">Jr.</abbr> etc.
2. Handling different types of addresses: How does one handle the TYPE (e.g. postal, work, etc.) specification for addresses as specified in RFC 2426 Section 3.2.1?
 - A: ACCEPTED FAQ. By Brian Suda (2005-11-08 updated by Tantek) If you want to add a type to certain elements, including address and telephone it may be done in the following manner:

<span class="adr">
<span class="type">work</span>:
...
</span>

<span class="tel">
<span class="type">work</span>:
<span class="value">123.456.7890</span>
</span>

the TYPE needs to be a sub-element of the property (adr, tel, etc) NOTE: EMAIL does NOT have many TYPE attributes, only INTERNET and X400

2005-07-22 raised by DanConnolly
1. ...in my cellphone/sidekick address book, I have a number of entries for companies. I wrote asHCard.xsl to convert the data from RDF to hCard, but I don't know what to do with entries for companies, since FN is mandatory in hCard.
 - A: ACCEPTED. This should at least be an FAQ. "How do I write an hCard for a company?" The vCard specification is silent on this point (entries for companies). Thus there are two options as far as the hCard standard is concerned:
 1. Set "fn" and "org" to the same value. E.g. W3C (recommended)
 2. Set "org" as usual, and set "fn" explicitly to empty. E.g. W3C or
 - Simply have no "fn", and on the parsing side, if there is no "fn" present, but there is an "org" property, then duplicate the "org" value as "fn"
 - The last two options are effectively the same and are both not explicit and easily confusable with a "missing data" condition. Thus option 1 is preferred. For converting applications (hCard to vCard), they may consider using proprietary extensions to make the distinction explicit in generated vCards, based on either case 1 or 2 above. E.g. Apple's Address Book application supports the property: X-ABShowAs:COMPANY
 - We are looking for descriptions of how other vCard supporting applications treat "company" vCards differently from "person" vCards. Please provide descriptions here:
 - Address Book / MacOSX.3:
 - Export (e.g. drag & drop to desktop, view in text editor)
 Sets "FN" and "ORG" to the name of the company
 
 Sets proprietary X-ABShowAs:COMPANY
 - Import (e.g. edit in text editor, drag & drop from desktop)
 By setting "FN" and "ORG' to the same name (e.g. Banana Computers Inc.)
 
 And removing any proprietary properties (e.g. X-ABShowAs)
 
 Address Book user interface showed new vCard as a "company" contact rather an a person
 - Address Book MacOSX.4:
 - same results as above -RyanKing
 - The Danger Hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) address book:
 - Export (e.g. email to a mailing list)
 Sets "FN" to the empty string and puts the company name in "ORG".
 - Import - could not find a way to import a .vcf, by email, IM, or other means into the Sidekick.
 - Contacts / Outlook 2003 Windows
 - Export (e.g. Highlight contact, File, Save As, vcard)
 Sets "N" and "ORG to the name of the company
 
 Sets "FN" to value in "File as:"
 - Add another vCard app here.
 - RESOLVED. hCard now specifically describes organization contact info. Remaining to-do: add to hcard-faq accordingly.

2005-07-23 raised by DanConnolly
1. Are class names case sensitive or not? hcard says "If names in the source schema are case-insensitive, then use an all lowercase equivalent."
  - A: ACCEPTED FAQ. Class names are case sensitive per the HTML4 specification. Hence hCard explicitly specifies the case of class name to use for source schema names that are case-insensitive.
2. ...but I find example data with class="Given-Name"
  - A: ACCEPTED RESOLVED. That is from an older preliminary version of the hCard spec which used mixed case class names. Such class names are no longer valid hCard. Please note which examples (URLs) are using the older class names and hopefully we can get them fixed.
    - A: By Brian Suda I have fixed all the references in the hcard-brainstorming page to reflect the lower-case style, this is a hold-over from the original design, X2V has been updated.
3. ..and code that supports it [data with class="Given-Name"].
  - A: ACCEPTED RESOLVED. Any code supporting the older class name(s) is for backward compatibility only, and should be phased out. Any new hCard code SHOULD NOT support such mixed case class names.
    - rfc2629xslt.html uses Street-Address, Family-Name, etc.
      - A: By Julian Reschke Fixed rfc2629.xslt (2005-10-29)
    - X2V Version 0.5.1 2005-07-08 supports Family-Name etc.
      - A: By Brian Suda I agree that the upper-case class names can be removed from the code, this was a hold-over and will be trimmed.
4. The ul/ol stuff for multiple values of a property seems to be in the X2V code and in hcard-brainstorming but not in the hcard spec.
  - A. ACCEPTED RESOLVED. This needs to be added to the spec. 2005-11-08 Update: the way multiple values has been updated to work much better and not require ul/ol.
5. the hcard-profile says country-name but X2V and lots of the data I've seen says country
  - A. ACCEPTED RESOLVED. RFC 2426 clearly says "country name" in both the prose and the grammar, thus "country-name" is the correct class name to use. If X2V uses just "country", it needs to be fixed to use "country-name", and any such examples as well. Please note which examples (URLs) are using the class name "country" and hopefully we can get them fixed.
    - A: By Brian Suda I have fixed all the references in the hcard-brainstorming page to reflect the proper country-name, X2V will support this in the next iteration when i fix several bugs at once.

2005-08-12 raised by Jack L. Wolfgang II. Use of mailto transport functionality for the E-Mail address field.
1. As stated in the hcard-brainstorming document, mailto is abused by spammers. As a result, many organizations have moved to form-based contacts as opposed to mailtos. According to RFC 2426, Section 3.3.2, "A non-standard value can also be specified." Does this refer to a non-standard e-mail address value or type value?
  - A: ACCEPTED FAQ. Type value.

2005-10-30 raised by Julian Reschke.
1. Several implementations (Which ones? Please provide links.) seem to assume that any class attribute that contains the substring "vcard" indeed signals the presence of vcard information. Not so: there are examples (What examples? Please provide links.) of where a token in the class attribute indeed only starts with "vcard", in which it should be ignored. Implementations using XPath (such as XSLT or Greasemonkey scripts) should be advised to do a contains(concat(@class,' '),'vcard ').
  - REJECTED VAGUE. Which implementations? And which examples?
  - (Note: the code contains(concat(@class,' '),'vcard ') is broken see parsing-microformats#Parsing_class_values for a correct example --Robert Bachmann)

2005-12-08 raised by Kenny Heaton.
1. The specification gives no way to to declare a telephone extension, as in (800) 234-5678 ext. 101
  - ACCEPTED FAQ. What is the best way to declare a telephone extension in a "tel" property? (also seems like it would be a vCard FAQ).

2006

2006-01-21 raised by Ben Boyle.
1. Have run into issues trying to use definition lists with hCard, specifically around nesting requirements for tel where the DT element takes a class "type" (e.g. Telephone, Facsimile) and the DD element marks the value. It is invalid to place any other elements within a DL that wrap around the DT/DD pairs so there is no available element to assign the class "tel" to. XHTML2 proposes a DI element that will resolve this issue. I am hoping for an interim solution for those that wish to use definition lists, perhaps that "any class that would be placed on the DI parent (in XHTML2) must instead be placed on the first DT element". I realise this will cause headaches for those implementing hCard parsers. I'd also like to note this may affect other (current or future) microformats and relates to the general hassle of definition lists in current (X)HTML recommendations. For your consideration - thanks!
  - REJECTED WORKAROUND AVAILABLE. Either don't use definition lists in this manner (because the description of a definition should go completely in the DD element, and thus you should be able to put the class on that), or use separate DLs in the cases where you would otherwise have needed a DI element.

2006-01-23 raised by David Janes (?).
1. Issue 1: Specifying Authoritative or Canonical or Official hCard
  - Use of rel="me" only specifies an alternate version, not necessarily the canonical version
  - Suggestion: use rel="me self". Adopt "self" semantics from Atom which means "the", or controversially "alternate, equivalent" version
    - The combined use of rel="me" and rel="self" may conflict with their definitions in the XFN Profile and RFC 4287 respectively. See the mailing list discussion on rel="me self" for more information. From Ryan Cannon.
  - Suggestion: use rel="via". Per RFC 4287, via "signifies that the IRI in the value of the href attribute identifies a resource that is the source of the information provided in the containing element." from Ryan Cannon.
  - Other suggestions? "authoritative", "canonical"?
  - Problems with this suggestion?
  - How does this relate to authentication/trust issues? Is this a different problem with a different scope?
    - (microformats-discuss list) Joe Andrieu: The concept behind an "authoritative" hCard rather than "definitive" or "canonical" one was that "authoritative" would explicitly be a claim by the author of the hCard regarding its authority in describing the subject of the hCard, i.e., use this hCard as the one true source of this individual's contact information.
    - To summarize: authentication/trust is a separate topic.
  - What exactly is the scope of the problem to solve here?
    - (IRC) (10:47:44) sreynen: for example, all of the examples I've seen involve a single person publishing multiple hCards of himself
    - (IRC) (10:48:13) sreynen: yet many people are talking about 3rd parties publishing hCards and pointing back to the subject's own hCard
  - rel="me" must be symmetrical, per the XFN spec. What exactly does this mean for this use?
  - "me" (and, depending on usage, "self") are not appropriate for content referring to third- parties. Andy Mabbett

TODO: please add appropriate context and history of this issue from the mailing list. Sign your name to your comments.

1. - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. MULTIPLE ISSUES AND BRAINSTORMING. The questions of authoritative, and canonical, and representative are likely different questions and must be deconstructed into separate issues. - Tantek
    - See representative-hcard for the resolution of the the representative hCard question.
    - "authoritative" hCard needs a better definition of the specific question.
    - "canonical" hCard needs a better definition of the specific question.

2006-01-28 raised by Tantek on #microformats
1. Is hCard is really appropriate for a named phone bridge, or do we need something else for a named phone numbers that are neither people nor organizations. For example see the "Zakim" hCard on http://www.w3.org/2005/12/allgroupoverview.html
  - ACCEPTED FAQ. Though hCard has been expanded to allow named locations, those are *physical* locations, and hCard is not really appropriate for named virtual locations (aka virtual addresses) such as a phone number or URL. However, given the use case of having a contact in one's address book for "Zakim" in order to "dial Zakim" as may be recommended in a working group IRC discussion, perhaps Zakim is a virtual entity like an organization. -Tantek

2006-02-03 raised by Brian
1. We can use the geo microformat in hatom to represent GeoRSS element
  - ACCEPTED DOCUMENTATION. Yes, this should be documented in hatom-examples. -Tantek

2006-02-13 raised by Eron Wright
1. Few systems contemplate the altitude component of a coordinate, yet it exists. Altitude becomes important when working with 3D mapping software such as Google Earth. Indeed, the geocoding service that Google Earth uses returns a three-dimensional coordinate. I suggest that hCard provide explicit support for altitude.
  - REJECTED POSTPONED. Not in vCard. There is no "altitude" component in vCard (RFC 2426), and thus (certainly for now) there won't be any in hCard. If a new version of vCard were to come out with altitude, then we would add it to hCard. At some point we may also consider adding explicit extensions beyond vCard, but if we were to do so, we would capture them first on the hcard-brainstorming page. See also geo-extension-elevation.

2006-02-19 raised by Miika Mäkinen.
1. Couldn't the types for tel numbers be specified in a class? Now, for a phone number one needs to add the type as "visible" text, which is not always preferred. For example, type "Work", many times more suitable label could be "Office" or similar and sometimes you might not want to display any type information at all.
 - REJECTED TRIED ALREADY. Using class names for the "type" of a tel or adr was attempted, and failed in many situations. In addition, the "type" information is actual data, not just a property name, and thus deserves to be in the visible markup. Note that you can use abbreviations, e.g. <abbr class="type" title="work">W:</abbr> in order to present the type in a way that may better fit in with the rest of your presentation.

2006-02-23 raised by Jesse Skinner and Ben Buchanan.
1. Are multiple URLs allowed? The Property List suggests not, whereas email and tel have multiple type/value pairs. However, the parsing page suggests multiple URLs are OK. Either way, it seems clear that a type cannot be associated with a URL. So how exactly does hCard deal with multiple URLs?
  - RESOLVED FAQ: Multiple URLs are allowed. Some consuming agents (Apple's AddressBook.app among them) don't have an interface for producing multiple URLs, but they are still valid in vCard and therefore hCard. --RyanKing 17:58, 12 Jun 2006 (PDT)

2006-03-07 raised by Tantek.
1. Issue 1: In 99% of the cases I am finding the need to explicitly do "n" markup, the person has a three word fn which is in the form "given-name additional-name(or initial) family-name". Should we make three word fn's into another shorthand notation to make this easier for authors?
  - REJECTED. I have seen sufficient additional cases in systems that have full names but not structured names that have multi-word family names that I think such an algorithm may cause minor data corruption where part of a family-name is interpreted as an additional-name. -Tantek

2006-04-06 raised by Evan.
1. What is the relationship between the CATEGORY property and rel-tag? Can you add a tag to an hCard? How can you add a tag to a particular hcard on a page without tagging the other cards on a page?
 - ACCEPTED. Categories can optionally be represented as tags. The classname 'category' should always be used, but rel="tag" can optionally be used (in addition to the category classname). In the case that a rel-tag tag is used, the tag (as defined by rel-tag) is used for the category. Examples: (1) food and (2) <a class="category" rel="tag" href="http://example.com/food">Food!</a>. --RyanKing 15:16, 13 Jun 2006 (PDT)

2006-04-10 raised by Scott Reynen.
1. When someone looks at the hCard pages, one sees no collection of real-world publishing of contact data nor discussion of the properties implied by such examples, I think it's far too easy to infer that microformats come from other formats more than actual behavior. There's nothing on the process nor the hcard pages explaining this discrepancy. I would argue that there should be an explanation, probably in both places.
  - ACCEPTED. Agreed. Part of this is now documented in hcard-design-methodology, but to-do: document additional specifics in the process and process-faq accordingly.

2006-10-21 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. There should be some way to say that the URL of an hCard or hCalendar event is the URL of the page itself, without having to include a redundant, and accessibility-damaging link to that page, on the page itself.
  - Quite often I see "a" webpage accessible with several different URLs. Typically 1 URL is the "preferred" URL, expected to have a long lifetime. Sometimes other URLs are "convenience" URLs that may have been linked to in the past, but are expected to go away soon, which resolve to the same file (the "latest version"). Then there are "archive" URLs that show an exact copy of that webpage as it appeared some time in the past. I think we want to always use the "preferred" URL, no matter which of those URLs we happen to stumble upon first -- so the URL is not actually redundant. (How exactly is it "accessibility-damaging" for a page to link to itself? Could you explain or add a link to an explanation?) --DavidCary 17:44, 5 Apr 2007 (PDT)
    - "How exactly is it "accessibility-damaging" for a page to link to itself?" - Novice user clicks on link; nothing (it appears) happens. Repeat ad infinitum, until user leaves site to do something else. Andy Mabbett 02:43, 6 Apr 2007 (PDT)
      - That scenario demonstrates more of a usability issue than an accessibility issue. Also, given that numerous (nearly all?) social network sites (e.g. sites with hcard-supporting-user-profiles) provide profile pages that link to themselves, this issue (and the above hypothesized user behavior) may be a theoretical misconception, and require data/studies to back it up, since modern accepted practice contradicts this hypothetical issue as currently described.
  - A: REJECTED THEORETICAL AND MISCONCEPTION. As noted, given that numerous (nearly all?) social network sites (e.g. sites with hcard-supporting-user-profiles) provide profile pages that link to themselves, the usability aspect of this issue may be a theoretical misconception, and require data/studies to back it up and thus for now is rejected. As far as any accessibility issue - if this were truly an accessibility issue, then accessibility tools such as screen readers would unlink/delink or otherwise not make clickable any links from a page to itself, thus solving any such supposed problem at the tool level. If accessibility tools are NOT doing so, that is, leaving pages links to themselves active, then they have likely decided that such links are not an accessibility problem.

2006-11-15 raised by Lachy in #whatwg (an IRC channel on freenode about The WHATWG).
1. I think the whole hCard specification needs to be restructured.
  - ACCEPTED. I (the editor, Tantek) have been rewriting the spec accordingly since 2007 June.
2. It's incredibly difficult to work out what each class name means and how to use them properly.
  - ACCEPTED. Thorough itemized list of class names have been added. Definitions are in the hcard-profile and how to use (some of) them properly are in hcard-authoring, but should also briefly be in the spec. - Tantek

2006-11-15 raised by hsivonen in #whatwg.
1. Without knowing iCalendar or vCard, it is totally non-obvious to see what hCards or hCalendars would be conforming. The normative part is extremely short and doesn't seem to establish clear enough a mapping between the microformats and the RFCs.
  - ACCEPTED. This (and Lachy's 2nd feedback point above) should be addressed by clarifying the mapping with better use of the hCard profile which does clearly map the class names to vCard properties and the sections of the vCard specification that defines them, as well as by adding to the itemized list of properties in the spec at least brief definitions that then link to the expanded definitions in the profile. - Tantek

2006-11-15 raised by Hixie in #whatwg (and agreed by Lachy and hsivonen).
1. The hCard spec basically reads as a brainstorm, not a normative spec.
  - ACCEPTED. As editor I will seek to make the hCard spec as normatively written as at least common W3C recommendations, and hopefully to the level of the HTML5 specification. -Tantek

2006-11-16 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. The "type" for "tel" lacks a "textphone" option (for the devices used by, e.g., people who are deaf or have speech difficulties. Example: Birmingham City Council (303 1119).
  - A: REJECTED. This is a vCard issue, as the "type" taxonomy for "tel" is determined by vCard. We are not presently extending hCard beyond the properties and values in vCard.
    - I'm not clear how you can "reject" a provably factual statement. What's the process of suggesting an update to vCard? Andy Mabbett
      - A: ACCEPTED PARTIAL RESOLVED. Unfortunately it is not clear what the process is for updating vCard. However, we can at least capture suggestions for improvement to vCard from this community which may be helpful once the process for updating vCard is understood. I've created vcard-suggestions for this purpose and added this suggestion. - Tantek
        The vCard spec is updated by RFC, for example RFC 4770. Andy Mabbett 06:22, 12 Jan 2007 (PST)

2006-11-17 raised by Lachlan Hunt (I second all of these feedback items. Andy Mabbett 07:15, 17 Nov 2006 (PST))
1. Semantic XHTML Design Princples: This section should go. Guidelines for how to write a microformats specification do not belong in the spec itself.
  - ACCEPTED. I've expanded on the specifics of this section AND moved it to a separate page accordingly hcard-design-methodology.
2. Format - More Semantic Equivalents: Explanations of how to use each property correctly should be given with each and every property, not just list a few at the top before the properties have even been defined.
  - ACCEPTED. Each property has now been listed explicitly. Brief explanations of each property will be added. -Tantek
3. Singlular vs. Plural: It is unclear what is meant by singular vs. plural properties. Ordinarily, a plural is word that refers to multiple objects, but in this spec, it's being used to designate a property that can be used more than once. It doesn't make sense because the property itself isn't a plural. Besides, this section should go. The number of times a property can be used should be listed with each individual property description.
  - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. The definition of singular and plural in this context will be expanded to clarify. Listing the number of times a property can be used with the individual property description will be considered, but may be rejected per editor discretion of keeping the spec shorter and simpler. -Tantek
4. Plural Properties Singularized: What the...? After attempting to read that paragraph several times, I still can't comprehend what on earth it's trying to say.
  - ACCEPTED. This section has been moved to an informative notes on derivation section. -Tantek
5. Human vs. Machine Readable: This title only makes some sense for the use of the abbr element. Everything in this section should be moved to a Conformance Requirements section, which explains how to extract values from the markup. It should also use RFC2119 terminology that describes exactly what a UA has to do. Presently, it's written too informatively, rather than normatively (particularly for the abbr element).
  - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. Note that the title also makes sense for the use of URL properties in attributes like href and src. A conformance requirements section is a reasonable request, but it may reference the Human vs. Machine Readable section rather than included it for better document flow. Agreed on use of RFC2119 terminology. -Tantek
6. Property List: This section is almost useless, it's effectively written like an index of properties but doesn't link to or help define, in any way whatsoever, what the actual meaning of a property is, nor how to use it. For every single property, all of the following information should be listed
  - Property name
  - Expansion (e.g. it's not clear from this section what fn stands for. First Name? Family Name? Full Name? Flight Number?)
  - Definition. (e.g. either copy the definition directly from vCard or provide a short summary, and also a link to the relevant vCard section. Saying just "See section #.#.# of RFC 2426.", as done in the profile, is not so easy to do.)
  - Usage
    - Contexts in which this property may be used
    - Content model (e.g. list of sub properties, expected elements, text, or whatever)
    - Syntax of the value (i.e. plain text, number, URI, etc.)
    - Elements this property may be used on
  - How to interpret the value (may link to relevant section in Conformance Requirements)
  - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. Much of this is good feedback on how to improve the property listing. Per some of the above resolutions, editor's discretion will be used to keep the property listing as short and simple as possible for better readability/accessibility. - Tantek

2006-11-23 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. The specification should be "stand alone", and not normally require reference to the vCard specification.
  - A: ACCEPTED PARTIAL. Agreed that hCard should be usable by typical web authors without having to dig through the vCard specification. Precise implementation of parsing etc. hCard properties however will likely require programmers to reference the specifics/grammars in the vCard specification which we will NOT replicate in the hCard specification in order to avoid inevitable introduction of errors due to duplication. And that being said, informative explanations may be a good idea, while the vCard property/value definitions are kept as normative.
    - Yes; my meaning was with reference to hCard publishing, not parsing-into-vCards. Andy Mabbett
2. The specification should state that "telephone numbers SHOULD adhere to ITU-T Recommendation E.123" (or perhaps "MUST").
  - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. This makes sense as an informative reference and a MAY, but since vCard makes no such SHOULD statement for TEL values, neither should/will hCard. In addition, as a Wikipedia URL that is subject to drastic change, we cannot make that a normative reference.
    - I take your point about Wikipedia - here's a more definitive ITU-E.123 URL; but it's for a chargeable document. Using "SHOULD" or "MUST" in hCard will not affect compatibility with or conversion to vCard. Andy Mabbett
  - ACCEPTED DOCUMENTATION. to-do. -Tantek

2006-11-24 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. A suggested work-around for the lack of a gender property is to represent gender implicitly in the honorific-prefix field, e.g. Mr. for male, and Ms. for female. This approach does has the limitation that "Mr." and "Ms." (or "Miss"/ "Mrs.") conflicts with a higher-ranking, gender-neutral honorific, such as "Dr." or "Rev." for the person, as it is unusual (and sometimes, outside the USA, invalid) to refer to someone as "Mr. Dr." or "Mrs. Rev." for example. Note also that some cultures or religions regard such titles as offensive, or at least disdain them.
  - ACCEPTED FAQ, PROPOSAL. This technique for communicating gender should be documented in the FAQ, along with the limitations noted in this issue, as well as a pointer to the gender proposal in progress. The gender proposal should also point to this existing technique, and note its limitations as additional justification for the proposal. -Tantek

2006-12-07 raised by RyanKing.
1. hCard org-fn matching should use organization-name, if given.
2. originally raised on uf-discuss by David Janes.
  - ACCEPTED. This is a good suggested clarification. Tantek to-do: update hCard accordingly.

2006-12-15 raised by WizardIsHungry
1. [Moved from a user talk page] Hey, why is hiding semi-useful information using CSS bad? The Geo and Address stuff wouldn't be enough to contact me, but I would like there so bookmarklets, crawlers, greasemonkey etc can manipulate it. Is there a policy on using CSS hiding of fields? Thanks :)
  - I guess we can't rely that anything that consumes hCards is normalizing it to a particular format instead of just taking all the xml inside the hcard classed block and sticking it somewhere. If it does just store it as a string, then generating html from it will yield the same hidden fields. Perhaps hiding fields by applying a stylesheet to the relevant hcard styles is ok, but not hiding them using in-line CSS styling. Feedback? --Jon Williams 10:28, 22 Dec 2006 (PST)
  - Furthermore, hcard-example1-steps shows using inline CSS to hide fields. What gives? I still think this is an open issue; particularly the distinction between external stylesheet hiding and inline rules though. --Jon Williams 13:33, 5 Jan 2007 (PST)
  - Should this be on microformats-issues? --Jon Williams 13:37, 5 Jan 2007 (PST)
    - REJECTED. The example you cite is the first of several steps, which refine and improve the first step's suboptimal hCard, not intended as examples for publication.
      - The question is: why is this considered suboptimal if it is ok to hide the entire card?'
        REJECTED. It is not OK to hide the entire card.
        Here are a number of examples of hiding the entire card, taken from hcard-examples-in-wild: [1] [2] [3] [4] -- Could someone link to where this was discussed and decided in the past, as it seems like this is being governed by fiat. Even if you don't care to have consensus, but could you at least justify this? This stonewalling is rather rude. --Jon Williams 13:24, 9 Jan 2007 (PST)
        ACCEPTED FAQ. This based on the microformats principle of visibility data is better than invisible data. More documentation is on the microformats principles page. The faq also has a related question and answer.
  - hcard-brainstorming#CSS_Styles explicitly permits this. I'm going with what they say.
    - REJECTED. Note that section explicitly says: "WARNING: This is very much recommended AGAINST". -Tantek

2006-12-15 raised (on 2006-12-14, on the mailing list) by Joe Andrieu.
1. (Paraphrased) By including organisations and places, as well as people, hCards have lost semantic specificity (see cited mailing list post for details).
  - Apparently intentional, but possibly requiring further extension. Andy Mabbett
  - REJECTED. As there are precise parsing rules for determining whether an hCard is an organization, or whether an hCard is a location, semantic precision is preserved from the publisher who decides to publish a person, organization, or location, thru to the parser, which determines the semantic specificness of whether the hCard is a person, organization, or place. -Tantek
  - REOPENED - the latter is a recent proposal, on a brainstorming page, and no more. There is insufficient evidence of use in the wild to be sure whether or not it meets all common publishing bahaviour. Andy Mabbett 05:32, 15 Dec 2007 (PST)
  - ACCEPTED PARTIAL. The organizations vs. people portion remains REJECTED. However, as indicated, the named location proposal needs to be tested with more examples. -Tantek
  - Consider also an hCard for a City, "Birmingham, England": Birmingham may be the "fn" and the "locality", but it's not an "extended-address". Perhaps the rule should be that the hCard is for a place if the "fn" is on any address component (e.g "fn locality" or "fn street-address")? See discussion at [5] et seq. Andy Mabbett 16:15, 30 Dec 2007 (PST)
    - If so, the "implied-n-optimisation" rule will need to be modified, to exclude cases where the fn is on the same attribute as an adr-child (which should probably not happen anyway). Andy Mabbett 13:59, 2 Jan 2008 (PST)

2007

2007-01-22 raised by Christina Hope.
1. What is the easiest way to display an hCard all on one line with spacing. Currently I am using this - but I know that there has to be an easier/ simpler way to do it. Example:

<p>
<span class="vcard">
<span class="fn">Christina Hope</span>& nbsp;& nbsp;& nbsp;
<span class="department">Information Technology</span>& nbsp;& nbsp;& nbsp;
<span class="role">Website Coordinator</span>& nbsp;& nbsp;& nbsp;
<span display="none" class="region"></span>
<span class="tel"> x3408</span> & nbsp;& nbsp;& nbsp;
<span class="email"><a href="mailto:chope@example.com">chope@example.com</a></span>
</span></p>

1. - ACCEPTED FAQ.

Try

<p class="vcard">
<span class="fn">Christina Hope</span>
<span class="department">Information Technology</span>
<span class="role">Website Coordinator</span>
<abbr class="tel" title="+44123 456 7890 x 3408"> x3408</abbr>
<a class="email" href="mailto:chope@example.com">chope@example.com</a>
</p>

Note: apply classes to existing elements; use abbr to give the phone number in full, in international format. Also, use CSS, not non- breaking spaces, for spacing.

Andy Mabbett 08:34, 22 Jan 2007 (PST)

2007-01-26 raised by [[User::JamesCraig|JamesCraig]].
1. RFC2426 'type' values cannot be localized/internationalized in hCard. In the example below, there is no solution to mark the Spanish version with a type of 'home' since the RFC2426 values are defined in English. abbr-design-pattern would suggest using abbr, but 'Casa' is not an abbreviated form of 'home', therefore the currently recommended version (below) is not valid.

<span class="tel" xml:lang="es">
  <abbr class="type" title="home">Casa</abbr> (<span class="type">pref</span>erido):
  <span class="value">+1.415.555.1212</span>
</span>

1. - REJECTED. TOO LITTLE INFORMATION. Please provide the precise URL to the specific statement on the accessify forum discussion that asserts that using abbr is not valid. Please also provide a precise URL to a *real world* (as opposed to an artificially constructed test case) example in the wild of an non-English hCard which attempts to specify RFC2426 type information on a "tel" property and fails to do so.
  - REOPENED and clarified (Also removed Accessify reference pulled from [original raising]).
    1. Though erroneously first raised on the accessibility page, this is not an accessibility issue. It is an HTML semantics issue for internationalization. abbr[title] should be an expanded form of abbr contents, in the same language.
    2. There are real-world non-English examples in the current Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) developer seed. This code example illustrates the point sufficiently.
    3. Please leave the clarification as-is even if you feel you must RE-REJECT (add-on, don't revert). My original points were lost when they were taken out of context and moved here. -[[User::JamesCraig|JamesCraig]]
2. To avoid i18n issues, microformats should keep its hands off content (this also affects hReview). abbr-design-pattern doesn't seem the right solution here. Someone from France suggested elsewhere to use the class value telwork, etc. but again it's a dubious solution (remember that a tel can have a type of voice and work at the same time). I suggest considering:

<span class="tel home pref" xml:lang="es">
  Casa (preferido):
  <span class="value">+1.415.555.1212</span>
</span>

It could be argued that somehow this solution violates the microformats principle of visible data. Maybe it does, but i18n should come first because otherwise microformats violates the first rule: solve a specific problem (and the last: "enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services: explicitly encourage the original 'spirit of the Web'"). -Xavier Badosa

1. - ACCEPTED SOLVED. The use of abbr and title attribute to provide an alternate language representation rather than an abbreviation expansion falls outside the semantics of abbr. The value-class-pattern has been devised as a solution to this problem, to avoid the semantic mis-use of abbr for this instance.

2007-01-30 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. Many sites, not least Wikipedia, publish co-ordinates as degrees-minutes-seconds (e.g. [6]). Should geo be extended to allow for this, with parsers making the conversion to digital values?
  - ACCEPTED BRAINSTORMING. My first instinct is that if a precise grammar can be defined for the human friendlier d-m-s syntax, and if that precise grammar reflects the 80% of existing real world cases (e.g. Wikipedia as cited), then it should be considered for addition to the geo property and thus hCard. This may help reduce the number of instances of needing to duplicate the d-m-s value as a decimal value for machines. -Tantek

2007-02-02 raised by [[User::DerrickPallas|Derrick Pallas]]
1. adr says that all of it's properties are singular; however, "street-address" is listed as zero-or-more.
  - ACCEPTED. This appears to have been fixed in the adr specification. "street-address" is no longer listed as zero-or-more.

2007-02-25 raised elsewhere by User:JamesCraig
1. internationalization Note: country-code may be missing. Usually a postal-code prefix such as "FIN-00630 Helsinki" or "L-4750 Petange" (Luxembourg).
  - ACCEPTED FAQ. This seems like just an FYI/FAQ rather than any real issue. Often country names can be inferred from postal-codes. Also perhaps the country-name can be marked up as an abbr subset of the postal-code in cases like the "FIN" example given. -Tantek

2007-03-19 raised by [[User::ChristinaHope|Christina Hope]]
1. Does Microsoft Outlook 2003 allow the use of the "role" property? I have added it to all of my hCards and it is not appearing. Am I doing something wrong?
  - - URL? (if no URL to a demonstrative example is provided within a year of this issue being raised, it will be closed as REJECTED INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION.)
    - REJECTED INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION. Perhaps a note can be added to vcard-implementations with mention of this issue, in case others come across it and can then document it more thoroughly.

2007-03-26 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. Parsers (Operator, Tails) currently expect adr to have one or more children. It is not clear from the spec that that's mandatory; nor is it always possible for an address field in a templated (or CMS) web site to be defined with such granularity. See hcard-brainstorming#ADR with no children for discussion.
  - ACCEPTED. Tantek to-do: Add more precision to how to handle adr sub-properties (or lack thereof) to adr and hcard. In particular, an "adr" without any sub-properties simply provides no information.

2007-03-28 raised by James Craig
1. Internationalization (i18n) issue for implied optimization of FN. Many languages (for example, Japanese) often list FN as "family-name given-name" instead of the assumed "given-name family-name" in English and other Western languages. There should be a affordance to indicate the order or a note in the spec indicating that the two-word FN is a shorthand for Western languages and any languages not fitting this format should explicitly define "family-name" and "given-name" every time.
  - ACCEPTED. Tantek to-do: add internationalization section in hCard spec, and note in the spec indicating that the two-word FN is a shorthand for Western languages and any languages not fitting this format should explicitly define "family-name" and "given-name" every time.

2007-03-31 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. The WGS84 scehma used as a default by geo will not remain valid forever. Fortunately, the proposed geo extension, originally intended for lunar/ Martian coordinates, also provides a facility for the specification of other, Earth-bound schema, which will alleviate this problem. Andy Mabbett 13:00, 31 Mar 2007 (PDT)
  - Note also the forthcoming European Terrestrial Reference System 89 schema (See also Etrs89 on Wikipedia. Andy Mabbett 03:11, 5 Apr 2007 (PDT)
  - ACCEPTED BRAINSTORMING. The geo-extension-strawman should be listed in geo-brainstorming for consideration in a revision of geo and the microformats that use it (hCard and hCalendar).

2007-04-09 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. Why is geo still a draft, when it's included in the already-published hCard spec?
  - ACCEPTED. geo has been vetted long enough by the community to be raised to the same level as hCard. Tantek to-do: send an email to microformats-new proposing this.

2007-04-19 raised by Andy Mabbett
1. How should we handle Old Style and New Style dates (i.e. Julian calendar vs. Gregorian), in DoB? For instance, Boris Pasternak, born "10 February [O.S. January 29] 1890". Should the hCard spec. specify New Style, using the abbr-design-pattern (or its successor) if necessary: <abbr title="1890-02-10">29 January 1890</abbr>?
 - ACCEPTED FAQ. The author of the content should specify *at least* an ISO compatible Gregorian date (i.e. using the Proleptic Gregorian Calendar as necessary), e.g. as the Boris Pasternak example does, and mark *that* date up with the bday property: "<abbr title="1890-02-10">10 February</abbr> [O.S. January 29] 1890" Since the likelihood of error/drift/misunderstanding is greatly increased by two different representations of date with different numbers with one of them being less visible (e.g. in the title attribute), pattern like the suggested <abbr title="1890-02-10">29 January 1890</abbr> MUST be avoided by authors.

2007-04-21 raised by Mark Nottingham.
1. Pages often list many addresses in the same locality, but hCard (and adr) are currently structured so that you have to repeat the entire global context for each address. For example,

<h2>Pizza Shops in Burlingame, California</h2> <ul> <li>Round Table - 231 Burlingame Avenue</li> <li>Village Host - 303 Broadway</li> <li>Pizza Hut - 43423 El Camino Real</li> </ul>

As specified, there'd be a lot of repeated information here.

However, if adr allowed use of locality, region, postcode and country as ancestors of the more specific address tags, it would save a lot of bits -- and help adoption of these microformats in this kind of case (which is quite common).

1. - ACCEPTED FAQ. Use the include-pattern. Andy Mabbett 03:51, 21 Apr 2007 (PDT)

2007-04-24 raised by singpolyma
1. What is the 'Label' property for
  - ACCEPTED FAQ. Per earlier resolutions, more explanation will be added to the hCard specification, and this question should be added to the hcard-faq.

2007-04-27 raised by Sjoerd Mullender
1. There is a proposal for a geo URI scheme [7]. It would be nice if that scheme and the geo hCard type could somehow be combined. It seems to me that if you want to use both and also have a human-readable version, you need three copies of the latitude/longitude:
```
Location: <a href="geo:52.356389,4.952222"><abbr class="latitude" title="52.356389">52°21'23.00" N</abbr> <abbr class="longitude" title="4.952222">4°57'08.00" E</abbr></a>
```
 - ACCEPTED BRAINSTORMING. This is a very interesting proposal, and clearly it is desirable to minimize the number of copies of the latitude/longitude. Thus this should be added to the geo brainstorming geo links section. -Tantek

2007-08-03 raised by MikeKaply.
1. Issue 1: When using the value design pattern, should the data be extracted completely (including HTML tags) or just text content? In general, the value pattern seems to imply taking the data exactly.
  - ACCEPTED FAQ. For value excerpting, the parsing is handled as it would be for the property, but just on the element with class name "value" rather than the element with the class name of the property itself. Thus in general just the text content but see hcard-parsing specific combinations of property and/or element for special cases. It is only the include-pattern which incorporates the HTML subtree (including tags) in its entirety.

2007-11-04 raised by RalfEngels.
1. Issue 1: The section Organization Contact Info is exeedingly vague. It says "I must not set the N property" and later on it says that I could set it to an empty value. Which of both is true? Must not or empty?
  - ACCEPTED. Tantek to-do: clarify the spec on this point. Not setting it and setting it to empty have the same effect. Improve the wording.
2. Issue 2: Same section. It does not cover e.g. Mr Fischer (N=Fischer) from the Fischer AG (ORG=Fischer). Could you re-formulate it stating that if the N attribute is missing the hcard is regarded as the card of a company.
  - REJECTED. If the "n" property is missing, then remaining fn+org or implied fn rules still apply.
3. Issue 3: Grouping as specified by rfc2425 and supported by vcard cannot be expressed. Grouping allows you to express the relation between different values.
  - REJECTED. hCard only maps the properties and values from vCard, not all features. Grouping in particular is excluded.
4. Issue 4: Implied n optimization: the typical case list specifies a (space) in the first and last line. In the middle lines it specifies a (comma). I guess this should mean (comma)(space) instead. In addition it contradicts with the previous text where you state that the separating character is a (whitespace)
  - ACCEPTED. Tantek to-do: clarify the spec on this point. space and whitespace are the same in this context.
5. Issue 5: Concatenation of texts is not consistent in the examples. Example file 21 contatinates telephone fields with spaces. Example 16 concatenates multiple name sub-properties by a comma. Example 34 even concatinates multiple note fields.
  - ACCEPTED. Tantek to-do: clarify concatenation handling in hcard-parsing. to-do: correct hcard-examples accordingly.

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