[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 01:10:31AM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> Er, all you need is iconv.  It's easy to make an application that runs
> in the local locale (ie. SJIS) and handles files in UTF-8.  Someone with
> LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.ISO-2022-JP should be able to run the encoder or tagger
> with JIS text and the tag should be written properly; there's no question
> about that.
> 
> Likewise, any library that reads Ogg tags (especially a reference one!)
> should probably take and return all data in LC_CTYPE, not UTF-8.  This
> is also extremely important: if you say "all data passed to these functions
> must be UTF-8", people will indeed ignore it and pass it locale-encoded
> data.  (It's not the app's job to do that kind of conversion, either; if a
> library wants everything internally and in its own data formats to be in
> UTF-8, it should deal with converting the data automatically.)

It's also worth noting that Unicode guarantees round-trip compatibility
with almost all of these character sets; except for CNS 11643-1992, EACC
and CCCII.  (The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0, p259.)  CNS 11643-1992
and CCCII are Chinese encodings; it seems most of the complaints are from
Japanese users.  EACC is another Han-unified character set.

This means that a Shift-JIS user entering tags in Shift-JIS, and getting
them stored in Unicode, should get the exact same text back when he
displays them again in Shift-JIS.

It's important to make sure all Asian programmers using such a library are
able to conveniently make sure he's able to use his own encoding in his own
buffers.  Normally, this is simple: you just setlocale().  I don't know
if there are a lot of cases where this isn't done.  In the modern Linux
world, it's always done--it's the clean way to do it.  But not everyone
is on a modern, i18n-capable OS.

(For Windows, it needs to convert to and from the codepage.)

It might be worth adding a backup interface to any reference library,
for the case that locales aren't supported, or for some reason can't be set.
It wouldn't be hard to implement.  (I wouldn't be surprised if this was
done already.)


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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