[vorbis] Desirable Properties of a Real Metadata Format

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 10:45:11PM -0700, Nathan I. Sharfi wrote:
| I suggest gzipped XML. Feel free to suggest something that isn't XML if you
| dislike it that much.

That makes a good deal of sense to me.  I'm not normally an XML zealot,
but it makes a lot more sense to use XML than coming up with our own
structured text format.  Another possibility would be to use some kind
of s-expressions; XML has in its favour an abundance of parsers and
other tools to manipulate it.

(Although: after reading Jack's post and searching the list archives it
sounds as though people have suggested and rejected XML-based metadata
over three years ago...)

| Does anyone have any idea how to deal with track num, er, indices like "9a,
| 9b", &c.? The best I can suggest is sorting numerically (i.e., not
| lexicographically) and then allowing the inclusion of some sort of
| comparison function...

No!  A better way is to treat consecutive digits as if they are base-ten
numbers, and sort any letters or other characters lexicographically.
For an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, take a look at:

        http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version

(The bit I'm referring to begins "The strings are compared from left to
right.")

Cheers,

Cameron.

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