[vorbis-dev] ogg stream-id options

[Michael Smith]

>I guess the bit count is not a really good argument (although it is just 
>"one point" against using XML). I really do like XML, but isn't it easier 
>to parse 'Title=Foo' instead of '<title>Foo</title>' - I mean what 
>advantages do you get from using XML? (besides being buzzword-compliant 
>;) Also what about "binary data" in the TOC (somebody mentioned for 
>example that Real JukeBox has the ability to embed images in an MP3 file 
>header (or something like that)). It is an interesting idea (attaching a 
>still image for the artist name for example) - although if that 
>capability is not there, I think people can live without it ;)

I agree that XML is a bad idea for metadata, but it's hard to invent a good
replacement that'll be sufficiently flexible for the purposes some peopl

e want to put it to. However, there are things that make it not entirely
bad. The ease-of-parsing argument is basically that, although xml is more
complex to parse than is strictly required, it's not much more so if you
want something fairly flexible. Further, there's a LOT of existing code
(and realistically, a lot of the big apps that'll be interested in parsing
the metadata code will already be using XML for some other stuff) to parse
XML - so the effort is little. Writing your own system is hard - although
the code might be simpler, you'd have to write all of it, which is much
MORE work. 

Binary data is also easily handled by XML - although it makes it messy and
no longer human readable, obviously. That's what CDATA sections are for
(the main part of XML documents is PCDATA - Parsed Character Data, you can
also specify a section of the document to be unparsed - CDATA - which you
can then pass through to something else as-is).

That said, I don't think XML is a good idea mostly because in reality, 99%
of the time, it'll be WAY heavier than is useful, and it means you DO need
a full XML parser there. It's also painful (though not impossible) to stream.

Michael

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