[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 02:06:31PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> It's no harder to deal with RFC2047 than it is to deal with UTF-8.
(and)
> Supporting encoding in the US-ASCII format is not hard.

We're not talking about how hard RFC2047 is.  That aside, yes, it is.
UTF-8 is being widely implemented, so its use is becoming widely known.
RFC2047 is only widely known among people implementing mail clients.

> >If that happens, I have to encode the string with RFC2047, so it'll be
> >decoded back; otherwise, things will try to decode it and odd things
> >happen.
> 
> Yes, that is correct.  Is that a problem for you?

Yes, it is--it means that tags that happen to contain text that looks
like RFC2047, many players won't be able to display them at all.

> >This means regular, all-UTF-8 tags can have RFC2047, so every player
> >must be able to decode it.
> 
> And I've said that it is trivial to support.  

Are you arguing that it should be allowed because it's easy to support,
or that it should be allowed because it's optional?  You're switching
back and forth between these, and they're very different arguments.  If
it was truly trivial to support, then there'd be no reason to make decoding
it optional.

> I thought you had done
> a decent modicum of coding before, RevZoot.  I'm having to reconsider.

I was under that impression myself.  Oh well.

> Au contraire.  A player that doesn't want to support RFC2047 can skip
> right over such tags.

Right, and lose tag information just because it was forced to be encoded
due to it containing text that could be interpreted as RFC2047.  You
should add "Note: text that looks like RFC2047 can not be reliably
displayed by this proposal, since players aren't required to decode it."

> >Both of these reasons are true, and you're the only one claiming they're
> >"bogus".  Lots of people agree the tags should be human-readable; you
> >(and maybe Dan) appear to be the the only ones who think this is
> 
> It was already discovered that its not possible for tags to be human
> readable in all circumstances.  The current proposal tries to make them

What circumstances?

> readable for the largest number of people.  You probably can't tell the
> difference between Chinese glyphs and a string of ????, so what shows up
> in your player software doesn't matter.  On the other hand a Chinese
> person will probably have things set up so that Korean glyphs show up as
> Korean, and Chinese as Chinese.

ç›´ and ? look fairly distinct to me.  YMMV.

> >UTF-8 glyphs that aren't in the local font can be displayed
> >intelligently, either as a placeholder font entry, a "best-fit", or by
> >simply using another font.
> 
> Have you actually tried this?

Tried?  I use a UTF-8 terminal daily.  (I'm using it now, actually.) I
frequently get mail (usually spam) in font regions my font, MS Gothic,
doesn't support, and they show up as boxes: the placeholder entry for this
font.

curl http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html

hows text for Japanese, Greek, and Polish, but not Hebrew or Armenian.

Best-fit matches (like displaying "n" if "ñ" isn't available) can be
done, too, but not if the text is encoded in a completely unknown
character set.

Using another font is what Explorer does.  Load
http://zewt.org/~glenn/test.html with Explorer on a system with both
Japanese and Chinese support installed, and both characters (which are
the same in Unicode) will display properly.  All it needs to know is the
language the text is in.  (That's the best way to do it.  It's also the
most complicated of these to implement, which is why my terminal doesn't
do it.  Doing it by embedding multiple encodings is more complicated
still.)


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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