[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Beni Cherniavksy]

On 2002-01-07, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 03:52:57PM +0200, Beni Cherniavksy wrote:
> >RFC2047 has a terrible price/advantage ratio since it means all
> >implementations must now include support for many encoding, instead of a
> >single one (UTF-8).  It's also ugly and not intended for this use.  Good
>
> That is false.  RFC2047 encoding can just be interpreted as plain text.
> And if that is ugly, so are UTF-8 glyphs that just don't happen to be in
> the local font.
>
With the current UTF-8 what you get is that glyphs for which you don't
have the font would be unreadable.  That's unavoidable in any case.
However people that do have the font will be able to read these glyphs,
although maybe not in the best posssible form.

If I read you correctly, you say "RFC2047 can appear in the tags; software
is free to replace it by a question mark".  This means that even if
you are a chinese person and obviously have the fonts, you won't be able
to read chinese tags at all on most software.

In effect you say "I want to support asian users in the standard" and "My
way to support them is good because I encourage software writers not to
support them".  Then you can blame it on the software writers that they
don't support asian users, while claiming your standard to be clean of
guilt.  It is precisely the separation between simple western encoding and
complex (therefore optional) asian encodings that makes asian users
miserable - nobody supports them.  Only a standard in the direction of
unicode (though they didn't do enough) can eventually cause most software
in the world to support asian text.

The UTF8_LANG solution is best IMO since it makes all software support
asian tags, though partially, for free and has a very low effort barrier
to add almost perfect support.

> >If you do want to indicate language, TAGS_LANG would be more descriptive
> >than UTF8_LANG, IMO.  Just LANG is bad since it would mean the language of
> >the audio itself to anybody not versed in the specs.
>
> No, UTF8_LANG indicates clearly that the tag is associated with UTF8
> data.  I don't want to encourage people to use Shift-JIS and Big5
> encodings for tags by giving them a tag like TAGS_LANG.  If people want
> to use Shift-JIS they can encode it using RFC2047.
>
Hmm, maybe you are right here.  The question is the meaning of the tag to
user that sees it for the first time in his life.  I would think it bogus
if I wasn't aware of this discussion.  Note also that language doesn't
mean encoding!


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at tx.technion.ac.il>
                 (also scben at t2 in Technion)

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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