Re: Music Notation on the Web

Hi Joe,

You may well be right about this, but they are perceived issues even if not
real issues. I think it's best to be able to go to site owners and say
"we've fixed your problem" rather than saying "that's not really a problem."
Sometimes just the aesthetics of space inefficiency are enough to make it a
problem.

The compressed file format offers many other advantages anyway. This
includes keeping linked/included images together with scores in a single
file, and offering a dedicated .mxl suffix rather than a generic .xml
suffix. The tradeoff is that it's a binary file rather than a text file,
albeit a very well-understood, standardized binary format (vanilla,
Java-compatible zip files).

Best regards,

Michael Good
Recordare LLC
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Joseph Berkovitz <joe@noteflight.com>wrote:

> Michael,
>
> Amen to a great deal of your note here, but I do wonder about the extent to
> which compression is a real issue.
>
> Doesn't server-side GZIP compression render bandwidth problems moot for
> text-based formats? Also, uncompressed MusicXML files are typically not much
> larger than high resolution PDFs in my experience.  Finally, the plummeting
> cost of disk space doesn't seem to me like it would really be an issue these
> days.
>
> ...Joe
>