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