[vorbis-dev] comment field proposal

[Daniel Phillips]

On Sun, 14 May 2000, you wrote:
> > What if the comment fields were defined to be HTML/XML?  That way you
> > could put ordinary text in them - only "<" and a couple of other
> > characters would require special treatment.
> 
> Woah... aren't we going a tad far for what was supposed to be a simple
> comment field?
> 
> I may be mistaken on this, but I thought the comments field was just there
> to store absolutely essential "I need this immediately forget everything
> else" type information.  Now there seems to be a great deal of talk about
> putting in an insane number of details...

Actually, it doesn't add any detail to the code, just to the documentation. 
You wouldn't be required to use the feature.

> I thought the plan was to interleave an XML metadata stream with the
> vorbis stream to hold all the needless details that people seem to enjoy.

Well, it seems to me that if you are going to use unicode you have a duty to
identify the language.  So either HTML/XML, as the route of least resistance,
should be allowed in the comment fields, or all this should be moved to the
metadata stream.  Allowing such a thing is really no work and after all,
this is year 2000, we have the tools to display the stuff.

A compromise would be to expect nothing in the 0th field, so that people
putting data there wouldn't have to worry about special treatment of "<" etc.


-- 
Daniel

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