[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 07:43:45AM -0800, Victoria E. Lease wrote:
> In XML-land, the xml:lang attribute handles language identification
> just fine, so the point is moot there. Just throw an xml:lang attr

Hmm.  Forgot about that tag.  (Must review my XML ...)

> in with any field that contains data in a language affected by han
> unification and away you go. Of course, the average player will
> probably ignore lang attrs, rather than switching han display for
> that field, but it could not be said that there is not a simple and

Well, I've suggested the metadata stream support translations,
transliterations and alternate versions within the same language (ie.
phonetic versions for CJK.) (I didn't originate all of these suggestions,
of course.)  Then it becomes very useful, for those who use them.  (I'm
not sure the phonetic version alone is very nice--better would be
something like the <RUBY> tag in HTML, to allow ie. furigana for
Japanese kanji.)

> Too bad indeed... it seems silly to me to try to make a character
> encoding system capable of representing any language on the earth,
> and then immediately omit huge sets of some languages' characters
> just because there are similar characters in languages from the same
> family. Not all literate Japanese-readers can read the Chinese
> versions of all of their characters, just like not all literate
> English-speakers can read the ancient Phoenecian equivalents of
> their characters ("but we need to represent both Phoenecian and

Well, we have a reasonable fallback: display it according to the user's
system.  (A program running on a Japanese system can find out fairly
easily that the user prefers Japanese versions of characters.)  It
doesn't help where that information isn't available--then you have to
ask, or just throw it at the font and hope it works.  (I'm American, on
a regular version of Windows; a player has no idea whether I prefer
C, J or K versions.)  It's probably a reasonable compromise for tags,
though.

It's also nice to have the language available for another reason: it
makes font selection a lot nicer.  IE lets you choose fonts individually
per-language; it's easy to implement.  Without that, you need to do
sometihng ugly like "use this font for the Unicode range containing Han
symbols, and this one for the rest".  (It's fairly important,
cosmetically--I can't stand Japanese fonts for English text.  And I'm
using one right now, since my terminal emulator can only use one font.)


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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