[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> I had planned to watch this thread for a while before adding my
> thoughts...
Hi Bryan - I had begun to wonder if you were on a vacation trip or something.
>
> John Chambers said -
....
>
> Did it occur to you, John, as an experienced and knowledgeable abc
> user and
> member of the standards committee, that it might have been more
> constructive
> to offer some helpful advice rather than slagging them off as wilfully
> incompetent?
Do you mean poor John is supposed to offer free personal tutoring to
anybody who wants to write ABC? John has given a lot of good advice on
the subject both here at abcusers and on his web site, so I don't think
you should criticize him for that.
...
>
> I agree that there are some irritating deviations from the standard in
> abc2win but they are documented and consistent so they can be worked
> round
> without too much trouble.
No doubt. The question is: does people take the trouble working around it?
>
> Yes, it is true that www.irishnet.com makes a bit of a pigs ear of the
> individually displayed tunes but I downloaded the whole collection...
I was wondering a bit about that too. Apparantly John must have missed
the fact that all the tunes at irishnet.com are also posted in a
separate file in addition to the embedded ABC tunes.
>
> It seems a little strange that, given the reactions to Gianni's
> description
> of abc2win as the de facto standard
[a lot of text omitted]
Seems we're comparing oranges and apples here. John and Phil were both
talking about whether the ABC tunes posted on the web were specially
formatted for some particular software. What program people who download
the stuff actually opens it in, is another matter.
...
>
> Interesting, then, that, in reply to Hartmut Wiechern's problems with
> Personent Hodie, Frank Nordberg said -
...
Just for the record: The incompatibility problems I was talking about
were all related to the V: field who isn't actually a part of the
standard at all.
>
> ABC's great strength is as a means of communication between musicians
> regardless of race, colour, creed, religious affiliation, hardware,
> operating
> system or software preference...
Amen to that. (You forgot to mention gender, though. Why is Laura the
only profilic *female* abcuser?)
>
> but do many of the developers care or
> are they
> only interested in their own "extensions to"/"gratuitous violations
> of" the
> standard regardless of the affect on anybody else?
The latter, I'm afraid. Can't really blame them, though. After all most
of them are doing this programming for fund - and for free.
>
> PS. I notice that there has been a little flurry of unsuscribes
> lately.
There has been a number of unsubscribe messages posted at the list
recently. But since these aren't supposed to appear here at all, you
can't draw any conclusions from that - except that something might be
wrong with the maillist system, of course.
Frank Nordberg
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
