[Bug 18764] MIDI messages don't all have a channel, and status should be part of data.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18764

--- Comment #12 from Florian Bomers <w3c_bugz@bome.com> 2012-09-07 09:09:19 UTC ---
thanks for taking the time to explain. 

It's not a big deal to me how I can send "long" messages (syntax is for
illustration purposes only, excuse my poor knowledge of WebIDL?):

A) variadic
   send(0xF0, 0x40, 0x00, 0x7F, 0x20, 0xF7);

B) array
   send([0xF0, 0x40, 0x00, 0x7F, 0x20, 0xF7]);

C) MIDIMessage
   send(new MIDIMessage(0, [0xF0, 0x40, 0x00, 0x7F, 0x20, 0xF7]));

I can live with all of the above, but A) does seem the most straight forward,
and I don't think that pushing arguments on the stack is worse than creating an
array and pushing the array pointer on the stack.

> Otherwise, the data will need to be inspected not only for length, 
> but for partial messages as well, and we will need a lot more error
> returns to explain to users how they've violated MIDI protocol.

For this argument, I don't see the difference of A) and C). And C) will be
available in any case, I guess.

However, I really don't think that a MIDI API should verify or otherwise
enforce that the byte stream sent via the API conforms to the MIDI protocol.
It's nice to optimize the API for short messages, but there should be a way for
the user to send what she wants, it IS a serial protocol! MIDI is used in so
many areas that it wouldn't be good to unnecessarily restrict the type of
messages that you can send. IMHO, the Windows MME and CoreMIDI do not set good
examples there (although Windows, at least, allows you to send arbitrary data
via midiOutLongMsg()). ALSA on Linux gives you full power with the RawMIDI
interface.

Summary: the method signatures are not so important to me as long as the API
does not enforce the MIDI protocol. Inspection of the data should be done only
for optimization and for formatting the data for the underlying OS functions
(e.g. CoreMIDI).

Sorry for the fuzz...

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Received on Friday, 7 September 2012 09:09:21 UTC