MixedContent

In this day and age of mp3 supremacy, I feel something missing from the experience of listening to music. I don’t want to sound like an old man here, but I get a feeling of satisfaction looking at my vinyl jazz collection that just isn’t replicated by seeing all my mp3’s sitting in a directory on my hardrive.

To address this problem, the XIPF group was created.
From the mailing list:

“The focus of this group is to discuss and begin to define an XIPF - Extensible Interactive Packaging Format. How do we add value to digital media by creating a standard packaging around it. What’s the digital version of the standard CD jacket?”

Recently, Lucas Gonze proposed an interesting idea of using XHTML as a packaging container. I had been thinking all along of XIPF just being a zipped or compressed folder containing resources (audio, images, etc…) and an xml manifest file that described the contents of the package. But by putting everything into a single XML (XHTML) document, including binary data for resources like images and audio, you get a single page mini app. Which I think is a really cool idea. As Lucas points out, it’s kind of like tidlywiki for audio.

The advantages of this approach are near ubiquitous adoption (what device or application can’t read XHTML), high ‘tinker’ factor (people will LOVE to build JS players, experiment with microformats for parsing, etc…), and portability (a single file is really nice).

There are some good reasons why munging binary data into an XML document is not a good idea, and there are some browser issues that need to be resolved with IE, but I think this could be great. Maybe this single XHTML audio file should be contained inside of a more traditional package?