[uf-new] PROPOSAL: Replace hAudio FN with TITLE

Fri Feb 15 16:34:16 PST 2008

OK, this is getting a bit wild. Can everyone please take a little 
stock. I shall try to lay out what I see are the ‘facts’ of this 
situation, which are being debated at length, but can't actually be 
altered.
So:
• ‘title’ is specified as something else.
• ‘fn’ is perceived as too generic and counter intuitive in the 
context of audio
My elaboration on those ‘facts’:
'Title' came from vcard, and trying to bodge its semantics into 
hAudio is just going to create a mess. Even if there's a tenuous way 
to make the definition fit both, it's just a bad idea to generalise 
two things which are very clearly not the same. ‘title’ a desirable, 
valuable field name, but it's gone. In our µf world, it's got a 
definition (which is not the most common English usage, it's true) 
and if it doesn't map to a usage in another proposed format then 
we'll have to use something else.
Regarding FN, I happen to agree. It's very generic and works in place 
of something-called-title, but the name is unintuitive. I don't think 
that helps publishers.
On the basis of those two things, there is very little to debate. 
TITLE is out of bounds because it doesn't mean what you want it to 
mean in the context of microformats. If ‘FN’ is agreed to be 
undesirable, then the only debate should be regarding what the 
alternative field name should be.
For my 2¢, I think the ‘audio-title’ route is OK, and has no 
‘namespacing’ consequences at all. The ‘audio-’ prefix is precision 
and clarification. It's not a grouping. ‘audio-title’ makes perfect 
sense in natural language, and it's a field that it's necessary to be 
more precise on. If there's some phrase that could be more 
transferrable (something synonymous with ‘media-title’) maybe that 
should be considered too. End of the day, though, ‘TITLE’ is gone, 
and if you don't like ‘FN’ then you need to find an alternative.
Perhaps the current debate would be more productive if it focused on 
solving that problem, rather than thrashing around the cement base of 
the issue.
Cheers,
Ben