Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 03:30:04PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: | > | > This is an old story in the computer field, which has always had one | > or two 800-pound gorillas who can thumb their noses at standards. And | > developers on the gorillas' platforms do tend to inherit the attitude | > that they are the standard and needn't waste time with what all those | > insignificant others decide to do. | > | > Users who continue to use old, unmaintained software just add to the | > level of frustration among developers and users who want things that | > the older software can't do. | > | > We don't have it nearly as bad as the HTML and java crowds. Our few | > incompatibilities are trivial in comparison. | | All this is true. But it's not as though there are many programs which | currently _are_ compatible with this 800lb gorilla, are there ?
Some are compatible, in the sense that they ignore ! or treat it like a space or unknown ornament. The problem comes when a program attempts to parse the !..! annotations, and gets confused by the abc2win ! char. | If I add spaces between any ":|:"'s and the following notes, then | jcabc2ps-20030710 can also read them. That's a bona-fide bug. It's in my Bugs file ... | But I guess you're talking about users of these, and other, tools | writing abc which the unchanging amd unchangeable abc2win can read ? Well, that's part of the problem. But I think we mostly ignore that, because it would mean we could never handle any music that abc2win can't handle. Software often reaches a point where you just have to be incompatible with very old versions, and hope they don't make too much of a mess of your new files. | I confess I don't know whether all of mine is thus readable. ISTR | some of it was Out There before abc2win even existed ... All I can say | is, I'm not getting floods of people mailing to complain. >From what I've seen on your web site, I expect that there's not a lot that isn't highly portable. The biggest real problem is that any abc that uses voices is not going to work well with programs that don't understand voices. It's still fairly easy to make single-voice abc work nearly everywhere. You may not always get the same formatting, and some ornaments may be wrong, but you will get readable music. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
