Something simple along the lines of:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cdindex version=0>
<album discid="123abc">
<title>
Dummy
</title>
<artist>
Portishead
</artist>
<track>
Mysterons
</track>
...
<track>
Glory Box
</track>
</album>
<album discid="qwerty">
...
</album>
</cdindex>
Benefits:
- XML displays directly on some current and the new 5 browsers (with
stylesheets)
- Not hard to parse (free parsers are available, hand-written optimized
parsers are not difficult)
- Provides an extensible, flexible framework (e.g. "Various Artists" can be
a thing of the past, each track could have its own artist entry)
- Could also be easily used in other, related contexts (e.g. A discography
web site)
- Potential for more value in incoming data stream (e.g. added notes etc.
that need not be sent to player clients but might be sent to more visual
clients after automatic negotiation)
Drawbacks:
- A bit more chatty than the existing CDINDEX scheme
- ?
Regards,
Les.Hill nospam at fmr.com