audio-info-brainstorming

Discussion Participants

Editors

• Manu Sporny, Bitmunk - Digital Bazaar, Inc.

Authors

• Add your name here

Purpose

The audio info microformat creates a standard method of marking up metadata and information about one or more audio recordings discussed on a web page.

Terminology

This section explores the terminology that should used to discuss an audio info microformat.

Discovered Elements

There were several elements that were identified during the discovery process as being good first-implementation candidates. They are listed below in order of popularity.

artist

The artist information was found on all pages related to audio recordings. This usually consisted of an artist name, band name, or orchestra name. This field could more loosely be described as the primary content creator.

Recommendations

It is recommended that artist name be wrapped in a vcard inside a 'collaborator' tag. For example:

<span class="collaborator fn">Green Day</span>

or:

<span class="collaborator">
 <div class="vcard">
  <span class="fn">Green Day</span> (<span class="role">artist</span>)
 </div>
</span>

title

The title of the album, song, speech or podcast was almost as prevalent as the artist name. This was usually a simple text value.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the title be implemented as a simple span tag:

<span class="title">I Have A Dream</span>

tracks (track/song listing)

Usually on a page listing an album or a podcast, a listing of tracks/songs available in the collection was detailed on the same page.

Recommendations

It is recommended that we not create a new collection Microformat and instead depend on nesting the same Microformat to denote collections of items.

Album example:

<div class="haudio">
 <span class="title">Audio Album Name</span> by
 <span class="collaborator fn">Artist Name</span>
 <div class="haudio">
  <span class="title">Track 1</span>
 </div>
 <div class="haudio">
  <span class="title">Track 2</span>
 </div>
 <div class="haudio">
  <span class="title">Track 3</span>
 </div>
</div>

Podcast example:

<div class="haudio">
 <span class="title">January 2007 Podcast</span> by
 <span class="collaborator fn">Podcaster Name</span>
 <div class="haudio">
  <span class="collaborator fn">Artist Name 1</span>
  <span class="title">Track 1</span>
 </div>
 <div class="haudio">
  <span class="collaborator fn">Artist Name 2</span>
  <span class="title">Track 2</span>
 </div>
</div>

release date

A release date is usually specified for the date that the album, song, track or podcast hit the streets. This is almost always in a standard date format.

Possible Uses

This section describes potential applications for an audio info microformat.

Transformational Uses

It may be desirable to process an audio blog using a transformational tool, such as XSLT, to produce a different representation that can be used elsewhere - such as in a REST invocation.

Archival Uses

Being able to scrape information from a web page and store it long term may be desirable for search companies.