--On January 4, 2005 7:38:27 AM -0800 Tim Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2005, at 1:39 AM, Henry Story wrote:
>>
>> I was just looking closely at the atom:Person class [1] and found some
>> pretty arbitrary limitations:
>> - why should a Person only have one e-mail address?
>> - why should a Person only have one associated url?
>
> It does seem to me that this will make an implementor's life a little easier.
> -Tim
Easier when reading the format, but harder when writing. The user or editor
will need to make selections from a richer (probably LDAP/X.500) record
to reduce it to this limited format.
Why not use inetOrgPerson (RFC 2798)? That should provide the easiest
mapping to and from most directories.
vCard seems to be a serialization format for directory information, not
a data model, so that doesn't really help decide what elements should
be in Atom.
Using inetOrgPerson also supports:
- corporate authors (published by Hewlett-Packard)
- Japanese names (givenname/familyname)
- nicknames ("Babs Jensen" for "Barbara Jensen")
- certificates
- postal addresses
Last time I was involved in LDAP, inetOrgPerson was widely used: Microsoft,
Novell, Netscape/Sun/iPlanet/whatever, and so on.
Tim: want to run this by the directory gurus at Sun and get their input?
wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect, Verity
