Alain and Thomas, I promised to read Alain's long message, it is printed but I spent all of today driving to a speciality wood supplier to get what I needed for the proper lute I'm making (to replace the flat back I've learned on). And I've only scanned Thomas' message.
There is a history, going back into the fifties and the earliest general purpose computers, of different protocols. There are many weaknesses in the TCP/IP standard that we use for the internet, it is rather elderly. But it is a standard. There are varying standards for photo reproduction in digital format, but they are shared. The point of a protocol is that it should be available to all programmers, even if it isn't perfect, in order to share formats among the users of different software. As I'm sure you know the early public use of the internet was provided by several competing services, each with their own internal format - and each requiring some effort to get out into the general internet. Compuserve, Genie, Prodigy (I was almost hired to develop the communications interface, I'd already done that for Citicorp's connection from their dedicated network to the internet, but the other guy won out). A few others, including the Delphi that was my first home computer internet connection (they, like the others, were an enclosed network - but they had the easiest access out to the internet). Compuserve was still using full numeric internet addresses for their clients in the early nineties (my murphsays.com, a few years ago, was 209.235.215.243 - but Compuserve required that within their system). OK, I'm really aiming somewhere. Indulge me with a couple more comments before coming back to the music. Two firms decided to monopolize the internet when it became a commodity. The internet came to life in the early nineties after Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web in 1989, setting up the combination of text addresses and HTML links (URLs and all that). The old "on line services" dropped back a bit and went "web side". But AOL came in, then M$ with MSN (Gates thought he could kill the internet with his own network - didn't work). But both of them made proprietary changes in standards of protocol to enhance their product (but also to deny access from the internet). Again it didn't work and we have moved away from "on line services" to ISPs - but AOL, and to some extent, MSN still carry breaks in the protocol standard. Note that if you aren't AOL you won't see the "embedded" photos in the email. Nice idea, embed them, but if you don't publish the standard then you can't get general acceptance - and general agreement is the goal of a communications protocol. OK, did it again. Now let's apply the lessons of thirty years of internet to music printing software. It is not a topic of great interest to governments, communications companies, or even the general public. What is needed is a protocol for printing staff or tabulation, and subsets that print Italian or French tabulation - or full score or normal staff or C staff or whatever. Finale and the rest should get together and agree on one - at the print end. Then they can concentrate their bells and whistles into the input and playback end. No real conversion is required, a simple program to turn each firm's output into a standard print format would suffice, and that should be written by a consortium and offered free. No loss to the software companies, the ease of use and switching should increase the sales base for all. Sounds idyllic, but not really. I can't count how many times I saw such things happen in my years in the software industry. In fact it is usually those who don't cooperate at the "transport level" who fail. Best, Jon To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
