I came across Amalgam | Psyclops which has a title with five space characters inside quotes (as seen in the file tags and the page source), which was only one space in MB. Tried to correct it to five which didn’t work directly, so I removed the space, then added five, which turned into one again.
One suggested thread for this topic was Support for thin space and the linked issues https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-5555 and https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-9576 suggest that MB automatically replaces any kind of space characters with one normal space. Which is fine for most “English” style titles, but not for cases like this where several spaces are intentional. (Also means that using five non-breaking spaces as a workaround doesn’t work.)
So there are two problem here: 1. Non-English languages want to use some of the types of spaces that MB forbids at the moment, which makes entering correct data impossible. Some types of spaces could also be used to improve title style (like narrow non-breaking space as thousands separator). 2. Sometimes consecutive spaces are intentionally used by an artist.
The first problem might be solved by allowing some spaces in some contexts (though that might become complex). The second by adding an advanced “literal edit mode” that doesn’t do any replacements (and could show every character’s unicode definition to ensure correctness, and input helpers for characters not on usual keyboards). This could also be used for the first problem in cases where heuristics fail.
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Some vaporwave artists like to use multiple spaces or even tabs too, or spaces at the beginning which I think it also removes?
Consecutive/trailing white space itself should certainly be forbidden IMO as it is typically hard-or-impossible-to-be-aware-of type error on user part that can produce weird effects down the line.
You are concerned with input, but I am more concerned about output:
- Every page needs double check as HTML eats white space
- It affects external tools too as titles finish in file names etc. which may affect all kind of other tools
I think annotation is enough for this.
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Some artists like to mess with the frame and structure of the medium they work in, for instance by violating conventions. That can be hard to deal with if we are using that same medium and relying on those very conventions to describe their work.
So, if the artist were publishing printed cover art on physical Releases, and they decided it would be fun to space the words of their titles out wider than usual, we would not be concerned with representing that spacing in our software’s character strings. However, if they are publishing their Release and Track titles in digital Releases as character strings in data structures, then we face the problem that we rely on the conventions (e.g. one space between words) which they are breaking. It is a different kind of choice to make our character strings different from their character strings.
No matter what rules we draw, no matter what conventions we rely on, some artist sooner or later will decide it is fun to break them. They will always be able to push us to some point where we cannot reproduce exactly what games they are playing.
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