On Friday 18 July 2003 11:25 am, Jack Campin wrote: > [ ordinarily I do not attribute posters I respond to, but this is such > mind-blowingly offensive, arrogant, counterproductive authoritarian > shite that no way could I ever forget the name of the author or want > it mistakenly attributed to anybody else ]
Phew. Some dried frog pills are in order, I think. (Though for the Americans on the list, I should probably point out that in Scottish terms, this isn't at all unfriendly. Jack's just pointing out the error of Steven's ways in a forthright manner.) Steven's point isn't that bad, and is equivalent to the movements in HTML/XHTML in recent years. If I stick a doctype declaration on my pages saying XHTML 1.0, browsers will attempt to render it in an XHTML compliant fashion. If I f***ed up, then it'll fall back to the methods it has for dealing with the bloated mess that is HTML2.0 - 4.0. There are good reasons for this; it's because XHTML is a better way to go than previous attempts at a markup language. Likewise, the intention here is to provide a new way of doing ABC. Hopefully, it will be a lot more featureful and be able to do a lot more than you could express with old-school ABC. However, to get there, we *have* to do things differently. ! is just a case in point. Sooner or later someone will have to bite the bullet and decide that it stays or it goes. Whatever, all this old-school ABC on the web won't be going away any time soon. So it's better to have a way of saying: there is a clean way to do this, or there's a messy way to do this. It's up to you, but the clean way is what's supported. The point is, this isn't a standards checker; it's a signal that the tune contains something that just doesn't exist or work under 1.7.6. It means: deal with this tune as per 2.0.0, as it has some clever stuff in it. And when someone wants something that ABC2 can't do, they can submit an RFE, and it can become supported, not a buggy hack that breaks other people's software. Of course, if the standard is sufficiently open and flexible to start with, it shouldn't be a problem... Cheers, Calum To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
