- From: Joe Berkovitz <joe@noteflight.com>
- Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2016 12:51:54 -0400
- To: Christina Noel <CNoel@musicnotes.com>
- Cc: "public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org" <public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org>, James Ingram <j.ingram@netcologne.de>
- Message-ID: <CA+ojG-a2sipUJCLr_X=GutNSPvH7Ujt4c++uKTPShG1TrfMrAw@mail.gmail.com>
> > > > > To be clear, are we talking about switching to SVG as the next radical rev > of MusicXML (which wouldn’t be XML anymore), or just talking about > organizational methods that can be applied to XML as well as SVG? > In my view (and I am aligned with the other co-chairs on this point): No, we are definitely *not* talking about switching to SVG as an overall framework for describing music -- particularly not for describing CWMN, or mensural notation, or neumes, or other notational languages with a well-defined symbolic vocabulary that transcends any particular visual representation. I have described the reasons why I think this is unworkable for software developers in the majority of cases, and won't repeat them again here. Let me just say that for CWMN scores, such a decision would make little more sense than using SVG as the main architecture for plain text. This does not mean that SVG has no role to play, though. For notational schemes that cannot be encoded without reference to the literal, visual contents of a score, SVG is potentially a good way to encode such scores and annotate it with musical information. (I personally do not favor directly including MIDI in the way that James Ingram describes.) A yes/no decision on SVG is not required right now. There is room to accommodate this type of approach going forward. At the Frankfurt meeting I spoke of Encoding Profiles ( https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/wiki/Music_Notation_Use_Cases#Document_Profiles). We can imagine a possible Encoding Profile which might state that the musical content of a score is provided as SVG rather than MusicXML-Next, with annotations similar in spirit to those proposed by James. This Profile would be used by works which want to forego the strictures of CWMN, etc. and are willing to give up the ability to be interpreted by most notation software, other than that specifically designed for this profile. You might think of the resulting profile as an optional "graphical score module" within the overall framework, whose apparoach is distinct from CWMN encodings. Both profiles might well share many features like segmentation into movements, bibliographic metadata, etc. I believe the work required to fully spec out a graphics-centric approach to notation is considerable, and requires much more than James's proposal so far. I don't think the CG should stop in its tracks while solving all these problems. I would suggest that members of the CG who are passionate about these cases develop their ideas more or less independently for a while and then we look at how we might fold the results into the overall spec. Best, ...Joe
Received on Friday, 22 April 2016 16:52:23 UTC