alternates-examples

Introduction

This page is to collect examples of alternates, that is, places where a user may be given several different items to choose amongst that at some logical level are considered equivalent.

Discussion Participants

Editor

• David Janes, BlogMatrix, Inc.

Authors

• David Janes, BlogMatrix, Inc.
• Lucas Gonze
• Greg Borenstein

Specific Examples from the Wild

MediaRSS

Yahoo's Media RSS provides the <media:group> tag to group alternate choices for the same media file together. Here's an example from their spec:

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Song Site</title>
<link>http://www.foo.com</link>
<description>Songs galore at different bitrates</description>
 <item>
  <title>Cool song by an artist</title>
  <link>http://www.foo.com/item1.htm</link>
  <media:group>
   <media:content url="http://www.foo.com/song64kbps.mp3" 
   fileSize="1000" bitrate="64" type="audio/mpeg" 
   isDefault="true" expression="full"/>
   <media:content url="http://www.foo.com/song128kbps.mp3" 
   fileSize="2000" bitrate="128" type="audio/mpeg" 
   expression="full"/>
   <media:content url="http://www.foo.com/song256kbps.mp3" 
   fileSize="4000" bitrate="256" type="audio/mpeg" 
   expression="full"/>
   <media:content url="http://www.foo.com/song512kbps.mp3.torrent" 
   fileSize="8000" type="application/x-bittorrent;enclosed=audio/mpeg" 
   expression="full"/>
   <media:content url="http://www.foo.com/song.wav" 
   fileSize="16000" type="audio/x-wav" expression="full"/>
   <media:credit role="musician">band member 1</media:credit>
   <media:credit role="musician">band member 2</media:credit>
   <media:category>music/artist name/album/song</media:category>
   <media:rating>nonadult</media:rating>
  </media:group>
 </item>
</channel>
</rss>

Note the mixing of alternates and related metadata together under the group tag.

hVlog

The vPIP (Videos Playing in Place) library uses a format called hVlog to identify media enclosures in blog posts.

See Also

• alternates-examples
• alternates-formats
• alternates-brainstorming
• media-metadata-examples -- Yahoo's Media RSS uses this