On 1 Apr 2004, at 18:39, Richard Robinson wrote:
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 06:20:00PM +0100, Neil Jennings wrote:MusicXML is plain text, just as all the markup languages are, but that doesn't mean you don't have to decode it. Can you decode even simple HTML by just reading it?.
Sure.
Anything can be made hard to read if you have a machine generate it, even ABC. But things are usually easier to read if they're written by hand - html is, for certain.
MusicXML needs to be read along with the DTD.
?? Try looking inside one, it's not often hard to see what things mean.
No, it's not difficult to understand, in fact you can pretty much guess what most of it means, since everything is <labelled>. The problem is the sheer volume of text you have to wade through. In abc, each note occupies one or two characters, in MusicXML it occupies half a page. A page of music in MusicXML can take up 100K of text. I found it very difficult to debug my software because I was spending most of my time wading through the MusicXML source looking for the specific construct that was causing the problem.
Phil Taylor
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