On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 03:33:01PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: > P J Headford comments: > | Just a reminder ... > | ABC is not just a computer thing. > > This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's > main features.... > > One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't > necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work > against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more > complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can > be a lot better than the fancier formats. > > | >From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this > | interface to the real world. > > MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not > at all a replacement or competitor for ABC.
But it's still plaintext ? You could read it if you had to, but no-one here would want to (by definition. It's an ABC list). Myself included. "Verbosity is not considered a drawback" they say. Not what we want. As the starter of this thread, I can only point out that I wasn't proposing MusicXML as a competitor or a replacement for ABC, I was proposing it as a complement. ABC is nicer for humans, xml is nicer for machines. Since we do hand our tunes over to computers to do things with, as well as writing them on the backs of envelopes, some things might be nicer for them to do in xml, if we could get the ABC back from it next time we want to interact with it directly. Though, having gone further into investigating this, I'm getting my original enthusiasm into perspective <grin>. XSLT makes it _really_ easy to parse notes (or anything else) out of musicxml, which is the tricky bit for abc. But having done that, it's not easy to see what you can do with it. Have W3C really given us a toy language with next to no storage ? The only variable type is a scalar, and they can only be assiged to on creation; nor can functions return values. Odd. I think I must be missing some sort of mindset thing. -- 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
