[vorbis] tags in comment field - why?

[Glenn Maynard]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 11:55:59AM -0500, Monty wrote:
> Yes.  This argument accounts for around half the mail in the archives
> for the past three years.  It seems to be something everyone can argue
> about and no one agree on; in short, vorbis has gone from 'first line
> of code' to [soon now] '1.0' before people have even agreed on
> metadata.

Well, then I'm in the small group of people not particularly fretting
about it; as long as the metadata stream actually gets done at some
point, the comment tags don't interest me very much.

> If you'd like to delay release of the codec another decade, I'm sure
> we could come up with a tag format 50% of us agree upon.
> 
> However, the *real* reason is that the comments are for people, not
> machines.  They're not a strict DTD, they're not machine readable
> fields, they're not a turing-complete programming language.  They're a
> strip of scotch tape on top of a CD for someone to scrawl one, maybe
> two, lines of text onto.
> 
> This, at least, has already been decided upon for years and it's a bit
> late to start digging the foundations back out.  Comments + a first
> class 'kitchen sink' metadata stream type.
>
> ...for the metadata stream, not comments.  

Yes, I know (on all points.)  The thread's been here. :)

> > The hardest part of a good tagging system is defining the tags ("title",
> > "track"), and we have to do that anyway. (I've seen the discussions about
> > this; I'm not suggesting any changes to these, here.)
> 
> No, this is entirely up to the user, not us implementors, because if
> we mandate something the users don't like... they'll do what they want
> anyway.

The point of that sentence was that defining the details of what information
is stored is a separate task from defining the tag format (which is already
done, of course) and the metadata format.  (Of course, the format needs
to bear in mind the types of data being stored, but it doesn't need to
know the details.)

I'm not suggesting any set of tags actually be *mandated*, either.  The
current tag proposal says explicitely that all tags are optional, and I
agree with that.  (If you leave it completely up to the user, then the
entire list of tags would just go away, and everyone would tag in
completely different ways.)


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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