[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Dan Hollis]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 09:32:22PM -0800, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > Yep. That's part of why asians hate unicode.
> Do they?  It isn't perfect, but it seems to be a definitive step
> forward.

The chinese character unification is looked upon as a big mess. Imagine if 
english script were "unified" with cyrillic and greek in unicode, because 
characters looked the same (but were in actuality different).

> You don't know what language the text is in, so you can't display it in
> a strictly *correct* way.  You need to know the language.  But before, 
> you couldn't display it at all if you didn't know what encoding it was
> in.  Both require a piece of information be stored somewhere; at least
> now, if it's missing, you can get something reasonable.  (You can't take
> a hunk of data--like a filename--and reliably determine what encoding
> it's in.  You always had to have all of your filenames in one encoding,
> so you couldn't really mix Japanese and Arabic filenames.  You can do
> that now.)

unicode is fine for *INTERNAL* representation, eg inside a kernel at a low 
level. as long as you realize that once converted to unicode points, you 
will *forever* lose critical information about the glyphs. it is a one-way 
conversion, like md5 hash.

unicode is *HORRIBLE* for data interchange between machines, because 
critical information is always lost.

> It seems you can still do everything you could before; you just can't do
> *everything* for free.

No. You lose information.

> I believe the best choice now would be to leave the tags alone--UTF-8
> only, no language tags, no encodings other than UTF-8.  Leave them alone
> and start the metadata stream, which can do this cleanly.

Please, no.

vorbis needs to stop being so euro-centric. (and only europeans would 
suggest using utf-8 for everything.)

-Dan

-- 
[-] Omae no subete no kichi wa ore no mono da. [-]

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