[vorbis] Comment field spec needs to be expanded and tightened

[Beni Cherniavsky]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Moritz Grimm wrote:

> > Composing date/location, encoding date/location, first played at
> > date/location.. There's loads of them :)
> 
> Yeah, but those dates anything but reasonable. I really believe that
> this is something to expect of the user, and if they do it different ...
> well, it shall not be my problem. And if someone writes 1854 as a year
> into the date tag of a classical music .ogg, it's rather obvious what
> the person who encoded the file meant.
> 
> Why not let the user decide whether to write some ISOIETFRFCW3C-standard
> thingie or just DATE=Composed in July 14th, 1997
> 
> Search engines should be intelligent enough to at least find the
> four-digit year in the tag, right?

It's worse than this.  I have a song whose lyrics I know to have been
written on 4 Sivan, 5694 (Jewish date) and I'm both lazy and deliberately
unwilling to translate it to a Gregorian date.  On another song I might
want to comment about the date that it was the XY anniversary of event Z.
This are just two possibilities for weird uses of date comments - the
possibilies for all comments are endless.

The comments are intended to be human-readable, not fancily
machine-processable (the simple open flat namespace w/o structuring
abilities is just not flexible enough to represent arbitrary metadata). I
believe that there should be guildlines promoting common usage of the
comments but no strict standartization: everything that can be reasonably
understood by a human being that got the file is a good comment.


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at crosswinds.net>
                 (also scben at t2,cben at tx in Technion)

  (/bin/ch x)^2 = (/bin/sh x)^2 + 1

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