On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 02:51:45PM -0400, Laura Conrad wrote: > >>>>> "Phil" == Phil Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Phil> Also I don't like the idea of > > Phil> %%MIDI nobarlines > > Phil> because it means something totally at odds with what it says. Bar > Phil> lines have nothing to do with midi - the midi standard provides > Phil> no way of representing them because they are a purely visual > Phil> feature of printed music > > I think it's a pretty good description of the music that would want to > tell a MIDI (or lilypond) writing program what I want to tell it, > though. > > The barlines are not purely visual, because any program that > translates standard notation into MIDI has to use them to decide how > to interpret the accidentals. > > Phil> If you want to specify that accidentals are non-persistent you > Phil> should not use %%midi becuase the implication is that a program > Phil> which plays abc directly without using midi can ignore it. > > I'm perfectly willing to live with some other terminology if other > people feel it communicates the idea better. The standard does need a > way to communicate this idea, though, and as far as I know, this is > the only method in current use.
Though, since this would be new behaviour, which programmers would have to write in, they could look for any %%magicword at all to trigger it ? Though, yes, the use of the existing %%midi namespace would be a clue - helpful in general (since it gives a rough idea of what sort of work it does) and misleading in particular (since, as Phil says, it's all player apps that would need to look at it, not just midi ones). I really think we should have some thought for this question of "proper" namespaces. The original use of them, in abcMIDI, had %%MIDI thisthatortheother which was a good idea, to make it clear what area they were in. Then the typesetters added a _lot_ of others with no such information about what sort of uses they apply to. More recently we've had some proposals for %%abc-thisthatorthother, and just now I see more proposals for some without any particular namespace. If these are only ever going to be used by one program, this may not be a particular problem; anybody that gets bored with picking their "interesting" ones out of this disparate chaos can invent their own identifier and ignore all the others. But if there is any idea that any of these should be understandable to more than one program, then I think it would be a really good idea if we could introduce some organisation into this. I would say "before it gets too late", but I've said that in the past, and it's later now, and there are more of them. Like, the case in question maybe should be %%play nobarlines if it applies to all player programs. And then midi programs would know that these apply to them and would also look for %%midi whatever which apps that play, eg direct to the speaker, could ignore. And we'd have things like %%abc include <filename> %%abc version X.Y.z-sectb_breakaway_faction_of_3rd_Sept_2004 %%abc charset for things which do refer to the ABC itself (I've followed the namespace id with a space rather than Irwin's hyphen, btw, just so I can show it the same as the original "midi", to try and sneak in the idea that these things could all be parseable in the same way). (Small note. %%abc-copyright isn't right. Maybe some people would have a need to coyright the abc itself, but there is also a need to record the copyright of the tune itself; "abc" isn't the right namespace for this, it has nothing to do with abc) I am aware that this would create a problem with the existing ones that don't use this technique. And if we go on inventing these willynilly, it'll grow up to be a bigger problem. While we seem to be busy redefining everything anyway, let's get it right. I mean, do we really want some of these to have namespace specifier and others not to, but just to throw %%papersize, %%loudness, %%staves, %%continueall, %%infoline, for example, all into the same space ? Is it clear and simple, for either humans or applications ? -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
