Proposal: <podcast:alternateDescription> tag #476
Replies: 5 comments
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Very interesting. Linking this on the mastodon for more visibility. |
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This is an interesting proposal. Permit me two pieces of feedback... typeThe The maximum length of the description is, in practice, 4,000 bytes. That's not written into any specification either; but for a specification, that might be a recommendation. languageGoing very deep into the weeds here, the RSS 2.0 specification for language tags is rather simpler than the BCP 47 or RFC5646 recommendations for HTML. I would recommend aligning with the RSS 2.0 specification here, which is essentially ISO 639-1 with a country code where required. That is significantly simpler for directories to parse, and aligns with the intentions of the RSS specification. I hate to wonder quite what a typical parser would do with Additionally, most usage on the web would expect Finally, could I suggest that your French example uses |
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I’m sorry, I just don’t see the need for this. Why should the description be in a language that’s different from the podcast content? And if there’s actually a legitimate reason for that, then why only the description and not the rest of the RSS text, like show/episode titles, show/episode descriptions, chapters, and more? I really think the better solution to this would be simply to release a different RSS feed with all the text in the target language. But that still goes back to the question of why publish content in a language different from all the contextual text? If it was a language-learning podcast, I still think it would be ideal for the majority of the text to be in the audience’s language, with only small quoted sections being in the other language. For example, an episode could be “What does ‘cinco’ mean?” Or a description could say, “Learn to be comfortable with common questions and answers useful in traveling, like ‘…,’ ‘…,’ and ‘….’” |
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I agree it would help to look at the actual use cases before deciding on what the feature should look like. i.e. Why do we actually want to have the description in a language that's different from the podcast audio? Surveying multilingual podcasts, I can see various categories of podcasts that may mix languages (Also see the related issue #367 - multilingual transcripts, which discusses the We have podcasts that are naturally multilingual, in regions where the audience commonly understands and switches between multiple languages on a daily basis. Interviews on each episode may be in the interviewee's native language, or sometimes switch mid conversation. We also have language learning podcasts where a host might teach a target language using a source language, or sometimes teach 100% in the target language with the description in the source language. That last one could be a valid use case for having multiple translations for the description. An example would be where the audio is 100% in simplified German, but intended to be understood by learners of German regardless of their source language, and in this case the description could theoretically be translated into multiple languages for multiple target audiences. In this use case, I see benefits to @theDanielJLewis 's proposal of having a separate RSS feed per language, because if you are going to have 10 translations of the feed content for different target audiences, the size of your RSS feed will go up by 10x. Separating each language into a separate file means that the client can download just the translation that it needs depending on the user's locale. On the other hand, consider podcasts that are naturally bilingual where the podcast hosts switch back and forth between two languages. In that case, having a separate RSS feed per language isn't the right solution, because the target audience is intended to understand both languages, and we would want to keep both languages in the description. Having something like @Atreyu-94 's proposal might then make more sense as at least part of the solution. Regarding https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag A minor point, but my preference is also to name the proposed tag |
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How about approaching this differently? Like a For example, the translated feed might look as simple as this for episodes: <item>
<guid>123455</guid>
<title>Español</title>
</item>When an item looks like that, it would replace only the title of the item that shares the GUID; all other text and content would remain the same. This could even allow for overwriting things like chapters and transcripts. This does, however, present a potential conflict with the possibility of an enclosure tag in the translated feed. Maybe that would be better than alternateEnclosure, or maybe it would be worse. But I think we could say simply, "Do not include enclosure tags in the translated feed." |
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My proposal is fundamentally based on the internationalization of podcasts.
Sometimes it would be useful to have a version of the description in one or more languages. I more or less followed the idea of
<podcast:transcript>.The idea is the following:
Parent
<item>Count
Multiple
Attributes
text/plain,text/html. I don't know exactly if there is a standard for formatting the description, at the moment HTML and Markdown come to mind.languageattribute. It would be important to determine the length of the string in this case.Examples
The original description should be considered with the same language that is specified by the RSS element.
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