One of the most backward and pedestrian things I've read in a long time were the ID3 notes on the r3mix site.

Wow. What an idiot. I've read most of the rest of his site and have issues with a lot of what he says, not in that he's necessarily wrong, just remarkably short-sighted. This is the icing on the cake.

Edit: I felt I had to rebut his points somewhere. This is driving me nuts, and I'm sure he won't listen.

1. Most applications that say "ID3 compliant" don't even support a fraction of it's full functionality
   
   So? Do I need to know how to read time-synchronized lyrics if all I'm doing is renaming files based on artist, track number, etc.? When I get an editor/viewer/player that does understand that, then it's there for me to use. Until then, I can have some slightly extraneous data or just not use those features.
   
   
2. Adding an ID3v2 tag to a VBR (or ABR) mp3 file makes it nearly impossible to get these files to play correctly
   
   No it doesn't. If the player doesn't understand ID3v2, then it's possible that it will get confused if the ID3v2 data is before the VBR header, but why not just put the ID3v2 header after the VBR header, an equally acceptable place. Remember that an ID3v2 tag can appear between any two MP3 frames.
   
   
3. Adding ID3 tags means farewell to "gapless play" of mp3s ... It doesn't need much imagination to understand that there are no players (software or hardware) around that flawlessly handle all versions and all fields in any ID3-d mp3 file.
   
   Aargh. This one really gets me. Assuming that the player knows about ID3v2, it knows how to read the length of the entire tag, not just parts of it. That's all it needs to know to skip past. There's no requirement that it be able to parse all fields in the tag, but even if it did, the fields are organized the same way, so if it had to parse through the fields, there's no reason it would need to understand the data in order to skip past it.
   
   
4. Removing ID3 tags is no easy task, sometimes nearly an impossible one
   
   This one is asinine. He's complaining that if you throw random data in an mp3 file that it's hard to get it out. And somehow that's the fault of ID3, depite the fact that he admits that it's not ID3. What a maroon.
   
   
5. There is no like-mindedness of correct application or acceptable use
   
   What difference does this make? If I want to put big cover images in, I'll put big cover images in. If you want to put little ones, that's fine, too. Just because we have different ideas about what we should put in it is no reason to say that it's bad. That's like saying that since mp3 supports many different sample rates and bitrates, it's bad, because there are too many options.

Aaaugh!