[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:51:45PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
> > If we are using UTF-8, why do we need a LANG tag again?  It should
> > display correctly no matter what your locale.
> 
> I think that's because Glenn wants the player software to be able to
> choose which of multiple translations of the title to display based on
> the user's locale and preferences. To most of us, displaying a title
> in Japanese glyphs isn't terribly meaningful.

That's something else, that I've agreed is something for the
comprehensive metadata stream, not for tags.

The problem is that you can't display all languages correctly with only
UTF-8 text, without knowing what language the text is in.  See

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/han_cjk.html
http://www.cs.ruu.nl/~otfried/Mule/unihan.html

This is why I made the suggestion to include the language of the tags.
(A global tag, indicating the language the text is in; no connection to
the language of the song nor to the tag keys, and not allowing different
languages for different tags.)  This isn't a country code, it's a
language code.  (This is a well-standardized list, and I'm not sure
where it is off-hand.  I'll try to get a link.)

For example, I might have tags:
A=Hello There
B=ç›´ (Text)
LANG=JA

(Note: JA is the language code for Japanese; JP is the country code for
Japan, and they're not interchangeable.)

This simply says that the text's language is Japanese.  Not all of it
is, of course (there's English text in there, too), but that's OK;
there's no ambiguity.  (Without knowing the language, we can still
display "Hello There"; it's clearly not Japanese text, and there's no
problem displaying it in a Japanese font.)  ç›´, however, is different in
Japanese and Chinese to the point where it's important to get it right,
and you need to know which language it's in to do that.

(I consider this one failing of Unicode, but it's not likely to go away.)

This isn't a perfect solution; you might have a Japanese title with a
Chinese name.  I think it's good enough, provided the metadata stream
actually *happens*.  I'm interested in getting that started; I hope I'm
not the only one.


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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