[uf-new] hAlbum Microformat brainstorming and proposal pages created

[Manu Sporny]

Brian Suda wrote:
> On 8/6/07, Manu Sporny <msporny at digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>> The new pages can be found here... they are rough, but should outline
>> what we're planning on discussing. hAlbum borrows very heavily from hAudio:
> 
> --- with the exception of TRACKS an Album has all the identical
> properties of the audio proposal.

hAlbum also has ALBUM-TITLE, which differs from AUDIO-TITLE in hAudio.
There are two differences between hAlbum and hAudio.

>> Once some of the hAudio issues have been addressed we can move on to
>> hAlbum... the page is up if people want to make changes, or start
>> commenting on the audio-album-issues page.
> 
> --- i'm slightly confused at the point of Albums being something different?

This goes back to discussions we have previously had on sets,
collections, playlists, podcasts and albums [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. From
what I remember, we decided that generic collections shouldn't be
discussed and we should focus on the problem at hand: podcasts,
playlists and albums. More specifically, we should focus on albums and
audio recordings.

In an attempt to make the problem simpler, hAudio became the markup for
single audio recordings. How we handled albums was TBD.

Since we don't want to bloat hAudio... creating hAlbum allows us to
re-use most of hAudio, only introduce 1-2 new class names, and solve the
album problem.

In other words - if you want to talk about single audio recordings, use
hAudio. If you want to talk about an audio album, use hAlbum + hAudio.

> (Please add the following to the issues pages of your choice)
> What happens when you have 10 tracks all reporting to be from
> different CDs, different artists, different album art, all .99cents.
> Then thoses are inside an hAlbum which is $5.99 (not the same price
> summed - this is ok, buy as a whole album or buy individually, like
> iTunes) and you have different artwork at the album level and
> different artists?

You mean, like this?

http://microformats.org/wiki/audio-album-proposal#Various_Artists_Album_Example

> Wouldn´t it be easier to just NOT have hAlbum, and simply add
> something to hAudio called "collection" or something? then all TRACKS
> on a page with the same value for COLLECTION could suffice? that fails
> to get you an OVERALL price for an album, but then maybe in your
> hAudio, simply make the track name optional... so if there is NO track
> name, but a collection name, then all the attributes are about the
> collection?

I think this complicates matters. All of a sudden, hAudio isn't just
about individual audio records, but collections of audio recordings. We
tried generic collections before and we tried mixing the two concepts,
neither of those strategies seemed to work in the past[1][2][3][4][5][6][7].

> Do we need a whole separate format to markup the exact same data twice?

Why do you say it's the exact same data? My assumption is that the
parsers would inherit any properties defined in hAlbum to all tracks
that are a part of that album. So, artist name is only specified once in
hAlbum, it doesn't need to be specified for each track. This is how the
majority of examples that we collected publish this sort of data. The
artist is mentioned once at the hAlbum level, and it is assumed that
each track listed on the page is a part of the previously stated album.

-- manu

[1]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-April/000152.html
[2]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-April/000183.html
[3]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-April/000227.html
[4]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-June/000449.html
[5]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-June/000449.html
[6]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-June/000451.html
[7]http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/2007-June/000482.html