Subject: Re: CUA capabilities

From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:38:45 -0700 (PDT)

> From: "Frank Dawson" <[email-masked]>
> To: "CalSch mailing list" <[email-masked]>
> 
> Folks:
> 
> The RFC 2445 has a ALTREP parameter on any TEXT valued property. This
> parameter is used to specify "alternate representation" of the property
> value. You can use this to specify other forms for properties such as
> DESCRIPTION and SUMMARY. We should be using this for specifying multiple
> instances of the DESCRIPTION, SUMMARY, etc.

ALTREP can be used for anything. No interoperatability if
one implementation expects them to be LANG, and another 
expects HTML.

-Doug
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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 02:52:24 +0000

> one implementation expects them to be LANG, and another

I think that could be made to work, actually.  ALTREP specifies a URI; if
it's an HTTP URL, then, when the CUA dereferences it, the server can do
content negotiation to (try to) provide the right language  While it's true
that ALTREP can be used for anything, I think all the reasonable uses for it
can be lumped into "find a better representation of this string"--where
"better" can mean "in a more pleasant format" or "in a language you can read"
or even "longer" (e.g., if the originator wrote a 10-page description, it may
be desirable to send only a summary to all the attendees).

I would like to see a way of delivering alternate languages inline, but
ALTREP will suffice.  (We may run into some use cases where it'll be seen as
discriminatory--e.g., when somebody in Canada publishes their events in
English with an ALTREP to get French if needed, and the French speakers
object to having to wait longer than the English speakers--but the answer to
that is to have the inline string contain both languages, and the ALTREP
present one or the other.)

--
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