MNX Proposal Overview

Good morning all,

I am pleased to share with you an initial draft of a proposal for MNX. The
co-chairs hope this will be a useful starting point for the next revision
of this group's music notation standard. We look forward to fruitful
discussions on this list, as well as in person in Frankfurt for those who
are able to join us in April.

This has been a long time in preparation -- far too long, I am sure -- and
I have little by way of excuse, even accounting for the unrelated work on
my plate. However, this pause in output has at least given me the chance to
think about the ideas presented here.

The phrase "starting point" is appropriate, as this document is still in a
formative state. While some of the solutions may survive to a later stage
of work, right now its purpose is to stimulate discussion by placing
something concrete in front of us to examine and debate. Indeed, the
co-chairs are not agreed on every element of the proposal, and much less
would we expect agreement from the community group at large.

To that end, the document also seeks to capture conflicting points of view
and alternate possibilities, which are noted as issues called out within
the proposal. Rather than using specification language, the proposal relies
on examples, to better allow experimentation with various answers to
problems.

You can find this document at:

https://w3c.github.io/mnx/overview/

The use cases formerly on the wiki have also been moved from the wiki, to
better track their concordance with the emerging description of MNX:

https://w3c.github.io/mnx/use-cases/

After an initial round of mailing list discussion, we will later move to
using Github issues to track various points. The github repo is at
https://github.com/w3c/mnx/ for version control details.

For now, the chairs look forward to some vigorous and positive exchanges of
views on the public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org list! Please do use this
contributor list for all discussion, in order to affirm that your
contributions conform to the W3C IP policy.

Best,

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
Founder
Noteflight LLC

49R Day Street
Somerville MA 02144
USA

"Bring music to life"
www.noteflight.com