Re: Unicode in vCard21

On Wednesday, Jan 15, 2003, at 08:34 US/Pacific, Bill Kearney wrote:

> You mention that various tools don't create BOM marked files.

Well, I specifically mentioned that Microsoft Entourage doesn't write a 
BOM in its UTF-16 vCard files. I don't know about any other programs 
that generate UTF-16.

> What about how they handle them?  Are they capable of handling your 
> suggestions?

I don't know. It wouldn't be surprising if Entourage were able to read 
a BOM even though it does not write one. At the very least, I'd expect 
it to ignore the BOM (which means it would only understand UTF-16BE, 
not LE), so at least it wouldn't fail to import UTF-16BE with a BOM. 
But I really don't know what it does in these cases.

The unfortunate fact is that the vCard definition(s) simply fails to 
define file formats, and therefore readers and writers of files simply 
may not all be compatible.

The only real answer is that if you want to interoperate using vCard, 
you'll have to test against the other programs you're interested in 
being compatible with, and make any necessary adjustments in your 
reader/writer to accommodate them.

Going forward, however, I highly recommend writing some form of UTF 
with a BOM. That will be the simplest for readers to handle 
unambiguously.

> This is a two-fold problem, one the bears fixing on the application 
> side whenever possible.  As is the custom in formats like XML, be 
> conservative in what you produce but liberal in what you'll accept.

Exactly. And try to evangelize writing and reading UTF with a BOM.

-- 
Chris Page - Mac Guy - Palm, Inc.