[vorbis] (Classical) Request for Standardization of expanded TAGS

[Jonathan Walther]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 11:30:15PM -0500, Wilson wrote:
>I won't cry myself to sleep because I filled in the name of the barbershop
>quartet in the ARTIST field rather than the ENSEMBLE field.

Well thats good.  You are a big boy.  So you won't cry either if your
favorite ogg player releases a version that doesn't recognize an ARTIST
tag, or pops up an annoying reminder window saying "switch to some of
these other tags instead".

>Also, nowhere in my message did I suggest that we no standardize a bunch of
>tag names.

Except you want to keep the meaningless ARTIST tag, for backwards
compatibility with software that hasn't been released yet, and might not
even support an ARTIST tag if the standard says not to!

>If you read the message, you'll see that I'm agreeing with the concept of
>subtags.

Tags are meant for simple data.  Subtags sound like "structure".  It
adds too much complexity to clients that want to parse and display them.
If you want structure, then use the metadata stream, not tags.

>I'd rather have one generic "ID" tag with substructures than 50 different
>tags that basically all mean "15 digit number that represents this exact
>disc."

Which 50 different tags? I only wanted one; someone else added 2 more
proposals in.  3 tags for different disc hashes and identifications is
still manageable.

>A profusion of tags that aren't clearly marked as "optional" is just going
>to confuse media player programmers, in my mind.

Perhaps you should have read the proposed standard more carefully.  All
the tags were stated to be optional.  You could even release an Ogg with
no tags!

Jonathan

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