#indiewebcamp 2012-03-20

2012-03-20 UTC
voxpelli, paulbooker, voxpelli-laptop, tantek, paulbooker1, adamw_, tilgovi, tilgovi_, lmorchard and barnabywalters joined the channel
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barnabywalters Hello, I'm new to IRC an not sure exactly how to 'break into' conversation here
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barnabywalters Just building a falcon-like web app for distributed content syndication, and was wondering if the single letter content type designators in tantek's Whistle are supposed to be used as standards?
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aaronpk barnabywalters: break into conversation exactly like you did!
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aaronpk also that's a great question. I think if you like the convention you should feel free to use it
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barnabywalters I like bits of it. I'm just trying to decide whether or not using to categorise types of post internally it is going to be useful or not
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barnabywalters I was also wondering what the 'reserved' letters (j, k, y, z) are for — @t doesn't explain
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aaronpk I saw an explanation somewhere, let me find it
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aaronpk http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/21743973/Whistle
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aaronpk actually: http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/21743973/Whistle#whyonelettercontenttypecodes
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barnabywalters cheers, that's what I'm looking at at the mo. I just can't see any explanation for why those characters are reserved
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barnabywalters the rest of them make sense and (barring a couple of niche things such as piece of sheet music) cover most eventualities.
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aaronpk oh yea there are a few that aren't listed
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barnabywalters well, I'll base my 'type' field around what he's got and add anything else I need on.
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barnabywalters cheers
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aaronpk feel free to write up any change syou end up making so we can see other use cases and motivations!
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tantek greetings
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barnabywalters and to you
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tantek the characters were reserved because I couldn't think of anything at the time that deserved its own one-letter prefix
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tantek anything *else* that is
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barnabywalters ah… so 'reserved' means 'open for interpretation'
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barnabywalters or 'open for extension'
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tantek rather, don't use unless you have a really good reason to do so, and if so, discuss that openly first :)
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barnabywalters here being the best place to discuss it?
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tantek here works
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tantek as you say, there are going to be many niche things that someone may want to post, but that doesn't mean they deserve their own single-letter
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barnabywalters well, what you have covers an awful lot.
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tantek the method I used to come up with that set was to look at what types of posts I or others I know have posted frequently in the past
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tantek so I left out anything theoretical or anything wishful (e.g. I'd like to post x y z) or anything that was only posted one or a few times.
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barnabywalters would it be worth designating a letter as 'other' for those cases, do you think?
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tantek e.g. I could have used "q" as "question" but I'm not sure it's different enough from a text note that it deserves its own letter
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tantek other is not useful as you can't do anything special with it
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barnabywalters true
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barnabywalters so the best action would be to shoehorn it into an existing category?
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tantek well, I'd start with research first
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tantek e.g. sheet music, are you publishing it now? if so where? what URLs? what site(s)? what personal URLs? what formats? with what UI?
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tantek that's worthy of documenting first
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tantek it's similar to what you'd document for a new microformat, so you could even document it on a wiki page there like http://microformats.org/wiki/sheet-music-examples
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barnabywalters Good plan. I'll have a think. Might also be worth asking jeremy keith for thoughts, as he runs the session (huge online sheet music db)
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tantek see http://microformats.org/wiki/examples for how to create such a *-examples wiki page and why.
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barnabywalters I was thinking of suggesting a new microformat for it. Perhaps that would be the best course of action for the moment
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tantek and if you have any questions about researching/documenting examples in that way, feel free to ask on #microformats
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barnabywalters that's great, will do.
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aaronpk I'd look at CDDB and ID3 tags as an inspiration too
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tantek sheet music is certainly an interesting form of structured information, however I don't know how people are (even attempting) publishing it on the web today, and we should start there.
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barnabywalters the most prominent format I know of it ABC, which is *very* metadata focused and plain text friendly
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tantek aaronpk CDDB and ID3 tags are a bit different, as they're more *info* about *media* (and documented at http://microformats.org/wiki/media-info-examples and related pages )
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tantek existing formats are also good to document, but that's a second step, after documenting existing examples
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aaronpk yes but there will be a lot of similarities since both often describe musical works. i.e. both will have composer, date, title, etc
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tantek e.g. such existing sheet music formats you could document on a page like: http://microformats.org/wiki/sheet-music-formats
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tantek aaronpk - I'm not sure I agree they are similar. it's more like, sheet music often has media info, but that's not the primary content/data of sheet music.
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tantek e.g. events often have location info but that doesn't make them "similar" to contact information.
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tantek events may *use* contact info, but they're not equivalent/similar to contact info
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aaronpk interesting. the way I see it, sheet music is the "source code" to an mp3 recording of it, so they will share many of the same properties.
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tantek that's a better analogy
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aaronpk copyright law recognizes recordings as an instance of the sheet music, you have to get separate copyrights for each new recording of a work, and there can be different copyright owners for the recording vs underlying written music
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barnabywalters there can also be multiple representations of sheet music e.g. abc, musicxml, sibelius scorch. Would image and pdf representations 'count' as sheet music though?
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tantek that's US copyright law presumably, and in what era etc. IANAL :)
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tantek Would an image or PDF representation of text 'count' ?
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barnabywalters well, it's not the purest way of getting at the data, for sure
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aaronpk fwiw I would still find an image or PDF version useful, since I could still pull them up on an ipad and play them at a piano
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barnabywalters but from a 'paving the cowpaths' point of view, there's a vast amount of sheet mucis on the web locked up in pdfs and images
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barnabywalters so the idea of a sheet music microformat IMO would be to store metadata and links to various representations
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barnabywalters whether or not the representations duplicate the metadata (as in abc) shouldn't matter
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barnabywalters example of how I present sheet music: http://waterpigs.co.uk/wpsm/tuneViewer.php?TUNE_ID=95
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barnabywalters as you see, the metadata is presented on the page, but is also stored with the ABC code
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aaronpk oh man that syntax reminds me of programming my 286 to play songs in basic
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barnabywalters :) It looks a bit unwieldy, but for everything apart from classical music it's the best way of quickly storing sheet music IMO
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aaronpk GW-BASIC reference for the PLAY statment: http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/play.html
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barnabywalters that is pretty similar :)
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tantek wow that's pretty interesting
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tantek those are very good example to use when writing up those sheet-music-examples and sheet-music-formats wiki pages
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barnabywalters I'll get onto that tomorrow. Getting a bit late here now.
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barnabywalters cheers guys, bye
singpolyma and tantek joined the channel