Music Notation on the Web - Last Call?

I must confess that I'm about to give up on this -- basically because I seem to be out there completely alone.  I have a pretty strong feeling that something really needs to be done, but I don't seem to be striking a lot of chords with people.  An analogy that occurs to me:  The W3C people had a tendency to think that the XML representation of RDF solved all problems -- except in practice just about nobody actually used it, or perhaps only used it as a last resort.  Now they have finally figured out that recognizing and standardizing Turtle (which is much more compressed, readable and easy to write for simple tasks) is a REALLY good idea.  You MusicXML guys seem to be saying that MusicXML can do anything anybody wants -- but for some reason it really doesn't seem to have much uptake.  For example, you note that there are 94 MusicXML scores in CPDL.  Well, there are links to 84 ABC scores.  Neither number is very impressive and they are all external links -- CPDL does not "natively" offer either.

If there are people lurking out there who would like to see something happen here it would be nice to hear from you.

-----Original Message-----
From: public-xg-audio-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-audio-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:44 AM
To: Michael Good
Cc: public-xg-audio@w3.org
Subject: Re: Music Notation on the Web

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Michael Good <musicxml@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).

For what it's worth, this was the design also taken by the W3C Widgets
group, see Widget packaging spec, http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/

I think they had some headaches figuring out how exactly to cite Zip
from a formal W3C spec, but http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#zip-archive
is the current text.

More than a few ebooks formats do the same I'm sure,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats ...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 14 December 2010 20:05:10 UTC