Style/Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous Guidelines

This page is for small guidelines that don't need their own wiki page.

Compatability Guidelines

These guidelines exist to minimise unnecessary compatability problems with clients that don't fully support Unicode.

Use of Quotation Marks (" and ')

• Use standard ASCII single and double quotes " and ' rather than the enhanced versions.
• Use " (one double quote) for inch.
• Use ' (one single quote) for feet.

Use of Ellipsis Mark (...)

• Use "..." (3 full stops) for an ellipsis rather than the special ellipsis character "…".
  • This was discussed on the mailing list here.

"Top something" Playlists

Bootleg torrents that are compilations based on playlists of charts authorities (like Billboard's) should not be stored in MusicBrainz as releases. These playlists are often copyrighted by their issuers.

Other Do-Not's

There's some guiding information available WhatNotToLinkTo, it is no OfficialStyleGuideline though but just information that should help editing.

Discussion

What about dashes vs. hyphens? See http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=5281475, I've encountered a similar problem there. Wouldn't it make a lot of sense if we would make full use of Unicode in the database and have some automated heuristic in the tagger to convert to ASCII if necessary? This heuristic could be made optional and dropped when a sufficient number of clients supports Unicode. I mean, the tagger does support Unicode in tags already, and so do several software players. Why should some hardware players pose a restriction for the whole system? Considering European languages, the replacement list shouldn't become too large to handle. Also, it doesn't have to be perfect, because in ASCII you can only do approximations of the correct typography, anyway. I'd volunteer to set up and maintain the list. AnswerMe, please, at least concerning the dashes vs. hyphens question ... Thanks. Editor:selig

• It would be probably better to ask on the mailing list. --LukasLalinsky I agree with Editor:selig. We ought to have the data in MusicBrainz rise above the particular limitations of this player or that filesystem of today, because if we don't, then tomorrow when the limitation is removed, our data will still be hobbled. It's the job of the tagger to dumb down the data to the limitations of the destination player or format of the moment. And by the way, this means I disagree with the guideline about "…"; our data ought to favour the ellipsis over three periods "...". — JimDeLaHunt 2008-01-07
  • While I would love to see better punctuation, it then raises its own cast of headaches, namely: * English editors would have to break built-in habits and learn some punctuation that most schools never actually bother with, ie, the use of «» in English, when to use ”“ vs "", when to use ’‘ vs ' ' (and how those usages differ between American English and British English). * Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian editors would have to deal with ““ and ‘‘, and the inevitability that people would try to incorrectly use ”“ and ’‘ instead. Swedish would also then have the complexity of when to use those, when to use »», and when to use (ignore the brackets here) [ - ][ - ] (space hyphen space, space hyphen space). * Dutch editors would have to deal with „“ and ‚‛ (and the inevitability that people would use them backwards) * « » instead of "" on French releases (and then which do we use in mixed language releases, such as classical?) We would also add in with this the complexity of non-closed guillemets in French («» becomes «?, «…, «! when the sentence ends in other than a period, and «—» (not «» «») when you have two adjacent quotations.) * German editors would have to deal with „“ and ‚‛ (and the inevitability that people would use them backwards), as well as «» and «‹›». * Italian editors (ie, all classical editors, etc) would have to distinguish between - – and —. * Italian editors would have to worry about when to use "", when to use «», and when to use "« »" (same as "' '" in English). * and so on... That's only 7 languages - and the above is only latin script, where essentially the same punctuation marks are used (just with slightly differing rules), and ignores the complexities of totally different punctuation *marks* in different languages... Add in typographic differences between quarterwidth, halfwidth, normalwidth, and fullwidth characters, it'd get really confusing. Now, not to be misunderstood - I do wish correct typography was something we could pull off. But considering how many basic misspellings we get, and how confused 99% of editors get when trying to deal with more complex formulations like CSG, I'd think asking everyone to suddenly become typographical experts before using punctuation, and adjusting their proper typographical punctuation dependent upon which language they're dealing with... just never would happen. We'd end up with an incredibly confusing guideline, with at least 1, normally 3 or more, language-specific differences, for each and every language. With as much difficulty as we have even getting everyone to use the proper capitalization for a given language, I just see getting everyone to also use and remember any given PunctuationStandardLanguage as great in theory, but someone that would never happen in practice. -- BrianSchweitzer 05:47, 08 January 2008 (UTC)