Subject: Re: [Ltru] Tagging of silent films (was: Re: el truth?)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:28:48 -0700

I discussed whether to request a formal tag for this usage with the MPA. 
We figured if we registered it, we would need to dilute the meaning to 
make it more global and define it, as Peter suggests, as "no linguistic 
content" or "no language present." 

But this is semantically different from "silent," which is very specific 
to our industry. Consider the difference between a silent film -- defined 
as a film with an actor mouthing words that features title cards to 
indicate what the actor is saying -- to films like Baraka, Koyaanisqatsi, 
and the Triplets of Belleville, which feature no language at all. 
(Belleville does have songs in French, but that's slightly different.) 
Also, the Library of Congress genre list defines "actuality" films as 
those early films that wowed viewers by merely showing a train entering a 
station. These latter examples would fall under the "no language present" 
classification, but not the "silent" classification.

In other words, it's possible we may need both tags -- silent AND no 
language present.

I don't consider silent to be a modal classification -- spoken, written, 
and signed are modes. And I'll even admit this is a somewhat impure use of 
language data. (Another reason why I don't think this should be 
registered.) Ideally, this metadata should be a boolean value. Silent or 
not silent. But within our industry, for compliance with external 
standards and product definition, we must define this as a language. 

I think und-silent is an oxymoron. If it's undetermined, how do you know 
it's silent? You've determined that the film features an actor mouthing 
the words, and you may have defined the title cards as being in French, 
English, or Sio. That doesn't seem undetermined to me. (If you don't mind, 
I'd prefer to gloss over the lipreaders issue.)

At present, we have no plans to register this tag and prefer to use "qsi" 
over "x-silent." I do think if the private use tags cannot be used for 
this purpose, what good are they? Do you really want me to request formal 
tags for both "silent" and "no language present"? That's my potential 
business need. That could set a precedent for other weird tags from other 
industries to enter the registry. Silent seems very industry-specific to 
me and this seemed to be an appropriate use case for the private use tag.

Karen Broome
Metadata Systems Designer
Sony Pictures Entertainment
310.244.4384

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Sent by: [email-masked]
09/27/2005 06:53 AM

        To:     "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
        cc:     [email-masked]
        Subject:        Re: [Ltru] Tagging of silent films (was: Re: el truth?)

--On tirsdag, september 27, 2005 09:25:39 -0400 "John.Cowan" 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Harald Tveit Alvestrand scripsit:
>
>> However, they ARE guaranteed to conflict with other private use of 
those
>> codes.
>>
>> Don't standardize private-use codes - not even in an "industry-wide
>> agreement". It hurts.
>
> I think that use of private tags by a group is precisely what they are
> for.  If private tags can't even be used by private agreement (between
> film people), they are useless.

That logically follows, of course - consider what happens when the film 
people adopt "qsi" for silent movies, the car people adopt "qsi" for a 
"test" voice on the car guidance system, and you insert a disk into the 
car 
entertainment system.....

Outside of use inside a single system/database, private tags are useless, 
IMHO.

>> i-silent is no longer available for public registration, methinks.
>
> Technically it still is, since we are in the RFC 3066 regime.  In the
> RFC 3066bis regime, the equivalent would be simply "silent", a non-639
> language subtag.

I certainly wouldn't encourage creating more interim  registrations.....

>> und-silent would be a valid code, if "silent" is registered as a 
variant
>> subtag with "und" as its prefix.
>
> Yes, that is registerable in both regimes.  It's a little paradoxical,
> though, since "und" represents ignorance on the part of the tagger, to
> qualify ignorance with something specific.  OTOH, people in silent films
> are generally speaking in some language, but viewers don't know or care
> what it is.

I'm told that deaf people often laugh in the most bizarre spots when 
watching silent movies - they are used to lip-reading the dialogue :-)

_______________________________________________
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---

From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:36:06 -0400

[email-masked] scripsit:

[long posting snipped]

+1

-- 
Winter:  MIT,                                   John Cowan
Keio, INRIA,                                    [email-masked]
Issue lots of Drafts.                           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
So much more to understand!                     http://www.reutershealth.com
Might simplicity return?                        (A "tanka", or extended haiku)

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 14:04:18 -0700

Hi -

(as a technical contributor)

> From: <[email-masked]>
> To: "Harald Tveit Alvestrand" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 10:28 AM
...
> me and this seemed to be an appropriate use case for the private use tag.
...

Although you may mean  "what good are they" rhetorically, the discussion of
issue #1061 reveals that some of us believe that the utility of private use
tags is extremely limited.  This resulted in the following text in the registry draft:

   Private use subtags, like all other subtags, MUST conform to the
   format and content constraints in the ABNF.  Private use subtags have
   no meaning outside the private agreement between the parties that
   intend to use or exchange language tags that employ them.  The same
   subtags MAY be used with a different meaning under a separate private
   agreement.  They SHOULD NOT be used where alternatives exist and
   SHOULD NOT be used in content or protocols intended for general use.

   Private use subtags are simply useless for information exchange
   without prior arrangement.  The value and semantic meaning of private
   use tags and of the subtags used within such a language tag are not
   defined by this document.

I think the sentence "They SHOULD NOT be used where alternatives
exist and SHOULD NOT be used in content or protocols intended for
general use" strongly supports Harald's and Peter's analyses.

So, if "qsi" were to be used for entries in a company-internal database,
I'd say it was probably OK.  For mass-market distribution worldwide, I'd
say it would be better to try to register something via [email-masked],
which is probably where this discussion belongs anyway.

Randy

---

From: "Kent Karlsson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:52:45 +0200 (CEST)

> In other words, it's possible we may need both tags -- silent AND no

I'm not sure there is such a big problem:
    - tag the video stream (just the pictures, not any sound stream
      at all) with:
        * 'und' or or (better) "no linguistic content" for films like
          Koyaanisqatsi, or
        * the appropriate tag(s) for the language(s) used for the
          language(s) actually used by the actors (if any and if known)
    - tag the sound stream with the language of the used in the sound
      stream:
        * und or or (better) "no linguistic content" for a "silent movie"
        * the appropriate the language(s) used for the language actually
          spoken in that sound track (which may be different from the
          language used by the actors seen on the associated video images).
    - tag the subtitles (which I would expect to be in a separate stream
      most of the time) or title cards (which unfortunately may be
      integrated with the picture stream) with the appropriate language
      tag(s).

A pure video stream (no sound) may have multiple (alternate) subtitle
streams associated with it, and it may have multiple (alternate) sound
streams associated with it too (at least in principle, I don't know
about various "full" video formats's capabilities).

"Silent" movies (which often have some sound), like Gold Rush, would
have a pure video stream language tagged as 'en' (for the spoken part,
not heard), 'en' for subtitles/title cards (unless translated to some
other language), but "no linguatistic content" tag for the ("normal")
sound track.

A film like Koyaanisqatsi would have both the pure video stream and the
sound stream language tagged as "no linguistic content".

This would apply also to a "metadata database", without the actual video,
sound, and text streams.

If "und" is not good enough for this, then register a new language tag,
but only one.

I don't see that anything more than that would be needed; except that
formats USING the language tags should take care to: 1) language tag
separate streams separately, 2) maybe allow for "substreams" (of some
sort) to have different language tags, and 3) allow images (pure video
stream) to have separate language tags for "imaged text" and other
linguistic content (like what language the actors speak).

But all of that is out of scope for this WG.

        /kent k

---

From: r&d afrac <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:30:07 +0200

At 19:28 27/09/2005, [email-masked] wrote:
>I don't consider silent to be a modal classification -- spoken, 
>written, and signed are modes.

How do you address Mime Marceau? I just looked into Google for 
"unspoken message". The result is 35 900. "silent message" is 28 700.

We are the IETF with obligations the LoC or the MPA have not. Our 
target is a registry to support protocols and information changes 
which may occur many times within a stream, a page, an image, etc. 
when a picture represents tens of thousands of images. So we cannot 
just consider in common with others or from experience as every trade 
is entitled to do: we have to analyse the proposition and be to say 
"it is" or "it is not". Otherwise at some stage, the proposition will 
not scale.

Or may be you mean "in my job I don't consider"?
jfc

---

From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:52:30 -0400

>         * 'und' or or (better) "no linguistic content" for films like

The 'und' tag does not mean "no linguistic content" or anything like it.
It means quite specifically "I have no clue".

-- 
I am expressing my opinion.  When my            John Cowan
honorable and gallant friend is called,         [email-masked]
he will express his opinion.  This is           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
the process which we call Debate.                   --Winston Churchill

---

From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:17:33 -0400

>    SHOULD NOT be used in content or protocols intended for general use.

Note the repeated use of the term "private agreement".

> I'd say it was probably OK.

That is as much as to say that you don't believe in private agreements,
for an agreement between an individual and itself is no agreement at all.

> For mass-market distribution worldwide, I'd

Agreed: it does belong there.

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
        analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
                --E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:57:29 -0700

Hi -

As co-chair: discussion of the advisability of registering a
particular tag for a particular purpose does not belong on
the [email-masked] mailing list.  It would be much more
appropriate on [email-masked].

As a technical contributor, on the general question of private
use subtags...

> From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: "LTRU Working Group" <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 5:17 PM

> Note the repeated use of the term "private agreement".

Indeed.  It means that only those who are parties to the agreement
will know what the subtag signifies, and that care should be taken
to ensure that those who are not parties to that particular private
agreement should not have to deal with it, since they may be parties
to another agreement assigning a different significance.

...

No, company-internal means that the organization has taken measures to
ensure that those not affiliated with the company (parties to the private
agreement) have no access to the information.  The issue is not the
number of parties to the private agreement, the issue is ensuring that
these things don't leak out to those who are not parties to that agreement.

Another example would be a company and its trading partners, operating
under some agreement.  These partners would need to carefully keep
track of their application contexts, since the same sequence of characters
used as a "private use subtag" might mean different things, since they
might be party to multiple private agreements.

What would *not* be an example of an apropriate use of private agreement,
in my opinion, would be for a mass-market product.  To claim that every
licensee of a particular product, or every purchaser of a DVD, would thereby
automatically be a party to a "private agreement" seems quite a stretch.
When I buy a DVD, how would my software come to know what those
private use tags are supposed  mean?

Randy

---

From: Marion Gunn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:17:11 +0100

> It means quite specifically "I have no clue".

No, John - more properly, it generally means 'there are clues a-plenty,
but you/the machine cannot determine, on the basis of its current
knowhow, the language(s) to which those clues are pointers'. 

As I have pointed out on lists before this, basing the tag 'und' on the
English word 'undetermined' has already caused no end of difficulties of
understanding and requires to be explained again and again. 

Personally, I'd be all for deprecating the tag 'und' and replacing it
with 'xxx' (a shorthand combination widely recognised across this planet
as indicating 'unknown/blank/yet to be filled in').
mg

-- 

Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an 
Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire.
* [email-masked] * [email-masked] *

---

From: "Kent Karlsson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 12:23:17 +0200 (CEST)

Apologies for some ungrammatical sentences I wrote that
resulted from some editing and lack of proof-reading
last night.

   /kent k

---

From: r&d afrac <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:20:22 +0200

At 04:57 28/09/2005, Randy Presuhn wrote:
>particular tag for a particular purpose does not belong on the 
>[email-masked] mailing list.  It would be much more appropriate on 
>[email-masked].

Dear co-Chair,
this is [email-masked] (or I would not be banned there 
because the moderator would be the IANA Chair).

>As a technical contributor, on the general question of private

<snip>

>only those who are parties to the agreement will know what the 
>subtag signifies, and that care should be taken to ensure that those 
>who are not parties to that particular private agreement should not 
>have to deal with it, since they may be parties to another agreement 
>assigning a different significance.

I must acknowledge that this WG-ltru takes care of that, disregarding 
consideration and denying IETF service to those whose role (like us 
and other CRCs) is to simultaneously serve the largest number of 
private use spaces, and SSDOs (like AFRAC, but others have been 
quoted like MPEG) which strives to be ISO 11179 compliant to than end.

You try desesperatly to prevent pollution between organisations in 
separating private use spaces. But you organise that pollution when 
private spaces join together, as it is the purpose of the DRS 
(distributed registry system). I know that the "consensus" as Harald 
nicely name it has a solution: everyone is to merge his private space 
in the unique space the "consensus" intends to master to build. End 
of the decentralisation, return to 1967 centralisation.

That CANNOT work.

>agreement) have no access to the information.

Just state it in the Draft.
I know ... it would then not be accepted by the IESG....
Do not worry, for that very reason it will not be accepted by IAB, or 
by IANA, or by WTO, or by WSIS or by EU or by countries or by users. 
And by then we will have the grassroot approach having taken over 
with another IANA structure. We already had similar tries in other areas ....

All that for one "0-" missing half-line in the text !

>The issue is not the

You know what? This is a big security issue ... and it is not quoted 
in the Security Considerations ....

>might be party to multiple private agreements.

Oh! Dear ... eventually said. How do you want to impose that protocol 
issue in ... applications (you do not even consider OPES)? Layer 
violation? We are IETF dumb network here, not smart hosts.

The best explanation I saw on this WG why the proposed Draft cannot 
scale. All that NOT to be ISO 11179 compliant!
(I know would the Draft be ISO 11179 compliant the exclusive would be 
gone .... - your problem is that more and more users will be. You can 
oppose me all the time, you can trick all the world some time, you 
cannot win the world all the time).

Too bad you have to make us all waste so much time to learn it...

>private use tags are supposed  mean?

As you may know, RFCs are for the Internet which by nature is a 
global system supporting mass-market. What you talk about is 
information pollution. I know you do not want to hear about DNS, but 
the DNS happens to have a 22 years long positive experience in that area.

At AFRAC we start feeling we are on a very big issue if people 
supported by so big ones consider our specific request worth so much 
time to delay it .....

jfc

---

From: "John.Cowan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:58:42 -0400

> private use tags are supposed  mean?

Well, this is a metadata standard, so part of the documentation of the standard
would be "This field contains an RFC 3066 tag; the private-use tag 'qsi' means
'silent film'."  Your software would come to know this by virtue of your
writing it to understand the metadata standard.  This is not a general-use
case like xml:lang tagging of arbitrary text.

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
        --Thomas Henry Huxley

---

From: "Kent Karlsson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 18:35:42 +0200 (CEST)

> would be "This field contains an RFC 3066 tag; the private-use tag 'qsi'

Ok, so far.

> means 'silent film'."

qsi is supposedly a *language* tag. "Silent", "film", "silent film"
does not really fit in there. If qsi in that metadata standard is
to have any language relation with respect to this, interpreting it
as "no lingustic content" (for an audio stream; or in some cases for
the images stream) would be far better. Or are we to have a language
subtag (variant) for films that does not show anyone speaking (or any
imaged text) but there is a narrative? (Like for nature/wildlife films
and the like.) I think not.

Using language tags for 'silent film', 'film with narrative' and
such would not be a suitable use of *language* tags.

Using 'und' or 'qsi' (within that context) for "no [determinable]
linguistic content" (for text, audio and imagages separate) would be
fine. And I don't think 'und' is all that wrong for that. Maybe the
sound of the talk is so faint that you didn't hear it ;-). If the
metadata standard allows for a langauge tag to be optional, leaving
the language tag out for saying "no [determinable] linguistic content"
would be fine too. If you want to distinguish "no-one is heard speaking"
from "jibberish-A" (and from "jibberish-B" etc.), which may or may not
be in some language unknown to the taggers (or just artistic, like
the "Swedish chef" in the Muppet Show), would that be worthwhile?
I'm not so sure.

   /kent k

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:59:31 -0700

Hi -

It's far too late to be talking about re-opening issue #879
(issue tracker at https://rt.psg.com/ user and password "ietf")
The WG reached a consensus on it, and the document has
completed IETF last call.  Unless you have identified a new
problem or have new operational experience that indicates
a need for extreme action, it's time to move on to the work
at hand: the matching draft.

Randy, ltru co-chair

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marion Gunn" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 2:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Tagging of silent films (was: Re: el truth?)

--

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:18:36 -0700

Hi -

> From: "r&d afrac" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>; "LTRU Working Group" <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 7:20 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Tagging of silent films
>

Wrong.   [email-masked] is the current implementation of
[email-masked].  This is fairly common and long-standing
practice for IETF-related mailing lists. See discussion of issue
#888 at https://rt.psg.com/ (user and password "ietf").

> of the decentralisation, return to 1967 centralisation.

This is a re-hash of the discussion of issue #1061.
The working group already reached a consensus.
Though, as a technical contributor, I don't like private
use tags, the WG reached a consensus, and, in the absence
of new information, there is no point in re-enacting the discussion.

> All that for one "0-" missing half-line in the text !

This is a re-hash of issue #1092.  The WG consensus was clearly to
reject your proposal.  Get over it.

> in the Security Considerations ....

I'll leave that to the security ADs.

> cannot win the world all the time).

I'm not able to make any sense of these two paragraphs.

> Too bad you have to make us all waste so much time to learn it...

It's your choice to waste time here.

> supported by so big ones consider our specific request worth so much

I *hope* you meant something else.  Your sentence implies that if
you make a mistake, you will insist on perpetuating that mistake if
others do not agree to make the same error.