[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 01:21:14AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> True.  How about this compromise?  We recommend people use
> UTF-8 where they can, but where that leads to ambiguity (as with Asian
> languages), they use the RFC2047 scheme?  I believe RFC2047 is upwards
> compatible with UTF-8 anyway, so you can even use both at once if
> the fancy takes you...

A few problems:

1. Using it at all means a ton of extra parsing; the tags are no longer
simple.  It's not optional parsing, either--it's something every parser
would *have* to implement, or they'll be displaying junk.

2. This means encodings other than UTF-8 in the tags; you now have an
endless number, for each language.  (This is one of the great things
about UTF-8: it gets rid of this.)  If you're an embedded player
(without a big honking glibc with support for just about every encoding,
able to convert it back to UTF-8), you probably can't deal with this.

3. The tags are no longer human-readable.  They have to be parsed and
converted to UTF-8 to be displayed.  (Granted, if you're on a Shift-JIS
terminal, you'll need to convert all of the tags anyway, but that's a
single, well-documented operation: a pipe through "iconv".)

4. Editors become a lot more complicated.  You have to figure out which
encoding to put each language's text in (and often there are many
alternatives: JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC-JP for Japanese, for example.)

Much of this defeats the point of using UTF-8.  It would be nice to be
able to have different languages in different tags, but not worth the
expense of having different *encodings* for different tags.


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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