[uf-new] hAudio 1.0 Draft Release

[Toby A Inkster]

Answering several messages in one...

Martin McEvoy wrote:

> In Microformats this means that if a propery is used more than 80% of
> the time then it should be included in the format, this will result in
> the top 20% of all discovered properties making their way into the  
> final
> Microformat.

Well, that's mathematical nonsense. Say we have 100 examples, each of  
which have (on average) five properties, but many of these properties  
are unique, such that overall there are 300 properties discovered.  
Say also that only three of these properties are common enough to  
have been found  in more than 80% of the examples. This means that  
you're saying that if the three properties that are used more than  
80% of the time are included in the format, this will result in the  
top 20% of all discovered properties making their way into the  
microformat. Thus 20% of 300 is 3, right?

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the effects emerge from 20%  
of the causes. So if there are N potential properties that can be  
included in the format, we can get 80% of the potential benefit by  
including the best N/5 of the properties.

Also, regarding use of "description" to include factual information  
about a recording:

> Indeed it is useful but can you cite any real life examples of this,
> where factual information can be read about an individual peice of
> audio?, I am not saying they dont exist, I would just like to  
> establish
> the exact source of your problem.


Examples include the "Product details" section on Amazon; or a  
summary of chart performance (such as what Wikipedia often includes  
for albums and singles).

> No it wouldn't but then again I have never seen markup like the above
> before, is it a review, a listing a blog post?  I cant solve
> hypothetical issues.


The example was intended as a simplification, but are you honestly  
saying you've never seen a description of an album where individual  
tracks are mentioned in prose, mid-paragraph? Wikipedia, blogs,  
discussion forums and so on are riddled with examples. In any such  
cases, "item" is needed to enable marking up of the tracks within the  
album without resorting to list markup. (Forcing the use of list  
markup would not be paving cowpaths.)

> <a rel="enclosure" href="my-foo-file" type="application/x-foo">Foo</a>
> I would just like to make type more explicit  in the hAudio format  
> itself.


The content type should certainly be made explicit when known, but  
making it a class name is a mistake - the type attribute should be  
used as above. Making it into a class takes it away from the link, so  
you end up with stuff like this, which is meaningless:

	<div class="haudio">
	  <span class="fn">Example</span>
	  <a rel="enclosure" href="foo1">download 1</a>
	  <span class="type">audio/ogg</span>
	  <a rel="enclosure" href="foo2">download 2</a>
	</div>

Which is the ogg file? hAudio should use the "type" attribute on the  
link - it is outside microformats principles to invent ersatz markup  
patterns for semantics that already exist in HTML.

> making
> album a required property seems extremely restrictive to me I don't
> understand the logic behind it at all.


I don't think anyone has suggested making album required. The current  
draft says that all hAudio instances *must* contain at "fn" *or*  
"album". That is, "album" is optional when "fn" is present, and "fn"  
is optional when "album" is present.

>  I had to look at the early implementers of haudio
> and see how they were using  Item, No One currently is using Item

The following use "item"...

The official website of Adele, a singer/songwriter who reached #1 in  
the UK album chart earlier this year:
http://adele.tv/music

A review of an album I put together earlier:
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/28/saturday-nights/

Some example uses of hAudio - contrived admittedly, but not too far  
away from the kind of stuff that gets published every day on blogs/ 
wikis/etc:
http://buzzword.org.uk/2008/audio/uf
http://weborganics.co.uk/haudio-rss/

A playlist on a blog:
http://openmediaweb.org/index.php/2008/01/13/publishing-my-workout- 
music-in-haudio/

The last of these seems to be having server problems right now, but  
the source code can be verified at archive.org. There are probably  
others too. (I wish there were a search engine that allowed you to  
search by grepping through HTML source!)

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>