Layout and Application Profiles

I'd like to respond to L Peter Deutsch's comment in the thread '*Suppress
the 'non-controlling' attribute in measures*', but starting a new topic
because the comments I am making concern longer-term discussions than the
original question.

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 7:39 PM, L Peter Deutsch <aemusic@major2nd.com>
 wrote:
> I have seen it argued that MusicXML importers should be free to disregard
> any and all elements of the input in favor of their own ideas of layout
and
> notation, with no approval by (or even indication to) the user.  I have
> argued, and will continue to argue, vociferously to the contrary, since
this
> stance is contrary to all industry practice in my experience.

I think certainty is very important, we all agree on this. However, in
terms of layout in particular, a dynamic rendering engine cannot possibly
be expected to respect static layout information intended for other use
cases.
Semantic/presentational separation and style sheets may be the answer to
some of these questions - however they may not answer the question, to what
extent the placement of visible objects are semantic or a matter of style -
especially when considering different applications' point of views at the
same time.

I agree, adding and disregarding elements in an ad-hoc manner is very bad
practice. However, it might be possible to define a structured way of doing
so. The ODD customization framework (which is the basis of MEI) allows for
a structured way of defining application profiles via a strict schema and
corresponding guidelines.

Background: at Tido, as well as developing a style sheet language that is
meant to address semantic vs. presentational problem, we are also working
on an MEI application profile that documents our consumer application's
input interface. We recognise that our application may have specific
requirements from the encoding, but by documenting these requirements with
an ODD schema, we hope to make the task of creating converters into our
input format relatively easy.

Best
Zoltan

-- 
www.tido-music.com

Tido Enterprise GmbH (Amtsgericht Leipzig, HRB 29529), Talstrasse 10, 04103 
Leipzig, Germany. Disclaimer: The information in this e-mail including any 
attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you have 
received this message in error, please contact the sender immediately and 
delete this message and any copies from your computer and network. The 
unauthorized use, distribution, copying or alteration of this e-mail and 
any attachments is strictly forbidden.