On Feb 11, 2008 9:42 AM, David K. Gasaway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 7 Feb 2008 at 0:44, Bogdan Butnaru wrote: > > It's civil up to here: > Come on, now. This whole thread has been pretty civil. :) Now that I think about it, ten people arguing and no trolling at all, I'd say it wasn't bad at all :)
> [...] any rules we define won't necessarily be correct when viewed > outside the narrow context of track listings on MusicBrainz.org or > tags in audio files. > > 5 - David claims en-dashes don't have any semantics, and here: > I meant that one dash symbol could be used without losing semantic > meaning. In other words, to use dash rather than an em-dash to > represent an interval does not destroy the semantic meaning behind the > interval. [ed.note: should be 'hyphen' and 'en-dash'.] > > * Alex and Lauri seem to argue that the "correct" (they don't seem to > > disagree on that) punctuation marks are hard-to-impossible to use, and > > are against requiring them. (It's not clear to me if they at least agree > > to "allow" or "encourage" their use.) > This is actually closer to how I feel on the issue. I don't want to > construct unnecessary barriers for editors or users. I would prefer > to, as Jeff so succinctly put it, "err on the side of inclusion". I understand and (partly) agree all three arguments I left standing above. But there's one thing that's bothering me: they can just as well apply to all our other rules. (Though perhaps it should be stated now and again that they're really guidelines. I tend to forget that.) I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, but all of the guidelines would not necessarily be correct outside of music tags (think LiveTrackStyle, version info, and even our artist intent mantra). We have the SubtitleStyle guideline, even though a colon is not necessarily the only or best way of expressing that semantic. (And the way we use it is not necessarily correct everywhere, e.g. in French). And the capitalization and sort name rules are rather hard and not really necessary, but we enforce them nevertheless. Even orthography is not something everyone cares about (I probably fixed a few hundred tracks in French and other diacritic-happy languages), but we encourage it without hitting people over the head when they get it wrong. Admittedly, these are all disparate issues, but I find it hard to see any reason why we should support correctness where we do now, but not in these other cases. At least, not any reason other than the status-quo, which is historically motivated but I don't think is still relevant. No-one (yet) argued we should impose a perfect standard twice the size of what we have now and then out-vote anything that doesn't conform. The proposal was just to define correctness in the (few and rather uncommon) cases where the current rules are "just use ASCII", and replace the rule with "Please do it the nice way if you can and care. Use ASCII if you want to add something, but don't change it if someone does it the nice way". I think that would scare anyone away. As for using em dash to separate tempos (or whatever) in the CSG, that's a completely different issue and IIRC nobody argued very strongly for it. (It isn't even "standard punctuation", just it's a domain-specific convention that seems to have some popularity.) It would be nice, and I wouldn't even notice it among the other complexities of CSG, but I can accept that maybe it could scare some people away, even if we say "use -- (two hyphens)" and use some script to change it. But it's completely different issue than that discussed above. -- Bogdan Butnaru — [EMAIL PROTECTED] "I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O. _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
