RE: Music Notation on the Web

Michael,
 
>>>> MIDI is too lossy even for pitches and rhythms in notation
applications. This is true for nearly any notation use case today. .  <<<<
 
I respectfully disagree. The suitability of MIDI for notation depends on
what level of detail is required. For someone that desires the detail that
Finale or Sibelius provides, I can agree that MIDI does not provide suitable
details. But at the same time, all of the leading DAWs can display music
data as a score and print it out, and for those users MIDI is obviously
sufficient. I even know someone who prints out horn parts from Band in a Box
for his band to play. So while I understand that from your perspective (as
someone constantly pushed to make notation as accurate and detailed as
possible) content detail is critical, for the majority of applications that
deal with notation it appears MIDI is sufficient. 
 
I'm inclined to think MIDI would be a good starting place for enabling music
notation on the web, simply because it is a known standard and the level of
detail is not so high that it would be difficult or complex to implement.
 
>>>> Roger's experience is probably related to some problems in Sibelius's
MusicXML import where Sibelius interprets some of MusicXML's formatting data
correctly but omits or misinterprets other data.  <<<< 
 
I see..  had I known about that problem I might have understood that to be
what Roger meant when he asked for "content" without "formatting"... but I
could still imagine he meant something else, since he never said what he
meant <g>.
 
Tom White
MMA