Re: Co-Chair Meeting Minutes: March 5, 2019 [via Music Notation Community Group]

Hi all,


> On 12 Mar 2019, at 10:22, capella-software Dr. Dominik Hörnel <d.hoernel@capella-software.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
>> The co-chairs are in broad agreement that we should focus MNX on the semantic format currently known as MNX-Common and move the MNX-Generic format to a separate specification. We will invite feedback from the user community about whether we are overlooking any advantages to the current approach, for feedback about the idea of separating them, and to solicit ideas for names for a newly-separated format.
> I fully agree with this decision. I think it is necessary for the MNX-Common specification to progress
> 

Me too. It seems a sensible decision

>> CSS in MNX
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Adriam raised the issue of using CSS-like styling in MNX, which is currently part of the draft specification. Although he thinks it's conceptually a beautiful idea, it will probably be impractical to embed CSS syntax directly in the format because it will require the building of a whole parallel parser. Michael agreed, and there was brief discussion about how we should take the aspects of CSS that work for us and build an XML-friendly approach that fits into the existing XML parser. We know that this was something of a controversial approach among the community for this reason anyway.
> One of the major goals of MNX is a clear separation of semantic concerns from presentation/interpretation concerns. Independently of how styling will be addressed (full CSS, CSS subset, other concepts) this goal should not be given up. CSS has the advantage that it is well-stablished and manageable standard. I would not like to see attributes like "default-x" or "color" merged with other semantic attributes in the MNX format. Otherwise we might run into getting MusicXML 4 instead of MNX. I don't think this is what we want.
> 
> 
> 

As probably the least qualified person to comment on this I'll comment anyway!
I had to remind myself what CSS is, and I came across this:

"CSS helps Web developers create a uniform look across several pages of a Web site. Instead of defining the style of each table and each block of text within a page's HTML, commonly used styles need to be defined only once in a CSS document."

This seems to be a mismatch to the requirements of default-x which can apply to no more than one layout component. I guess the MusicXML <defaults> element could be handled in a CSS-like way, but I would like to know how this would affect those of us who generate parser/serialiser code from the xsd schema.

regards
James Sutton
Dolphin Computing
www.dolphin-com.co.uk <http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk/>
www.seescore.co.uk <http://www.seescore.co.uk/>
www.playscore.co <http://www.playscore.co/>