[uf-dev] implied-n: what's in a name?

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 6/26/06 9:53 AM, "Drew McLellan" <lists at allinthehead.com> wrote:

> On 26 Jun 2006, at 17:23, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
>> On 6/26/06 8:48 AM, "Drew McLellan" <lists at allinthehead.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> The first implied-n optimisation rule states:
>>> 
>>>> The content of "FN" is broken into two "words" separated by
>>> whitespace.
>>> 
>>> My question is - what's a word? Obviously whitespace delimits a word,
>>> but is any non-whitespace value permitted? How about punctuation and
>>> numbers?
>> 
>> No.  Just whitespace.  This is explicit in the spec:
>> 
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#Implied_.22n.22_Optimization
>> 
>>  two words (separated by whitespace)
>> 
>>  two "words" separated by whitespace
>> 
>> 
>> If you see any wording that is ambiguous in the spec, please let me
>> know!
> 
> I guess the point I was unclear on was which characters were legal
> for a "word". That said, I can't think of an alternative phrasing
> that seems clearer than the spec is currently.

Then that's an excellent candidate for an FAQ.


>>> An example I just ran across is fn="Sarah-Jane Smith". Am I safe to
>>> imply n from that?
>> 
>> Yes.  This is precisely why I defined "two words" as separated by
>> whitespace
>> in the spec.  Many names have punctuation in the middle, and rarely
>> (if
>> ever?) does that punctuation serve to split/delimit the name into
>> several
>> names.  When it does, the explicit "given-name" "additional-name"
>> markup
>> MUST be used.
> 
> So in terms of a regular expression, a "word" can be matched by /\S+/
> a non-whitespace character, one or more times.

Yes.


>>> So many questions! :)
>> 
>> Keep asking!
>> 
>> Drew, perhaps this question about "N", whitespace and punctuation
>> in names
>> is deserving of adding to the hCard FAQ?
>> 
>>  http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-faq
> 
> I'll endeavour to write something up for that page.

Thanks!  Even if you just copy/past questions/answers from this email
thread, that would be great.  We can always do wiki cleanup later.  The
important part is to capture it.

Thanks,

Tantek