Summery so far: Collection of ideas

August Zajonc (augustz nospam at bigfoot.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 13:17:06 -0800

Wow, LOTs of ideas, here is a quick collection of all the good ones I've
seen so far. Greg or someone interested in keeping a running list of some of
them? I'd volunteer but am not running a CDDB replacement web page, so...

There are a couple of issues so far. They are:

Database structure, security, practical, legal.

Starting with the structure:

== Really neat idea popped up from Dave Ahn:

What I'd like to see is this is a generic format that is extensible enough
to be a generic Multimedia Indexing Format (MIF?) that can span CD's (audio,
multisession), DVD's (video, future audio), and even MP3's. We havea great
opportunity here, and simply designing a replacement for CDDB would be very
limiting in scope.

This would mean that a song entry for a track on a cd, and a movie that uses
that song, and an mp3 file could all be the same if the track was the same.
Excellent suggestion.

== Martin Nilsson suggests Unicode..

- All entries should be stored as Unicode. Or to be more correct, the
database should input and output Unicode data, how it is stored is of no
concern to me. If we are to get an IETF approval of any protocols they have
to support unicode according to their new guidelines.

Could complicate things for programmers to deal with. Maybe through a flag
if you want a unicode response?

Protocols?

== HTML/XML camp seems solid

The combination of HTML and XML seems solid to a lot of people, and allows
for just the flexibility that is being discussed.

And now for some security

== Everyone uses PGP? Or keeping it simple.

There have been some suggestions for a really elegant web of trust centered
around PGP. Some have expressed the concern that its a bit much... I tend to
agree. CDDB has done well so far with almost nothing. One option would be to
have a moderated sort of review system... Someone says, hey thats junk and
it gets killed. Most cases will be very obvious

== Legal

Everything open seems to be the agreement. How to do this. Was some mention
of the Open Content model...