Fwd: [mb-style] [Clean up CSG] Correct punctuation (was: Typography)

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On Feb 19, 2008 9:42 AM, David K. Gasaway <dave at gasaway.org> wrote:
> On 16 Feb 2008 at 10:40, Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
> > I submit that the trade-offs are advantageous,
> > because the hassle or inconsistency would be:
> >
> > 1) small in absolute terms, because the punctuation we're discussing is
> > uncommon.
>
> The idea that sparked this debate was to use certain characters to
> separate parts of a classical track title.  In other words, they
> wouldn't be uncommon at all.  Unless I'm missing something?

The primary proposal (IIRC, Brian's) was just to use correct
punctuation in general, including dashes and quotes. Those aren't such
a big deal IMO.

True, at some point it was mentioned that em dashes would be a good
separator for tempos (or something like that), but that's a distant
secondary issue. (It's not even a "correct punctuation" issue, it'd be
just a common convention, like " / " for separating songs.) And
although I'd personally like that, 95% of my arguing is not directed
at it, but at the first issue. It wasn't even proposed, Brian just
mentioned that some people do it (in catalogs) and we might consider
it.

>  2) even smaller in "perception" terms, because people who
> > notice these kinds of things would have already fixed the releases they
> > have, and the rest... won't notice.
>
> I'm not sure the rest wouldn't notice if their el-cheapo MP3 player
> suddenly starts displaying unreadable characters.  Not that I suggest
> MusicBrainz bow to the limitations of hardware devices.  Rather, I'd
> want to see that people are given, at minimum, an easy (possibly even
> default) way to opt out.

If we're still talking about emdashes between tempos, it's very easy
to opt out by replacing them in Picard. If we at any point were to
decide to use them by default, we could ask Lukas to add a particular
option to Picard to replace it with one or two hyphens; we could even
set it by default.

If we're talking about the punctuation in general, I think we could do
the same with some effort. I might send a patch for it anyway. But I
don't think you can get by with just ASCII anyway (think German and
French titles).

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.