How do I join and/or contribute?

Hello.  
I’ve recently learned of the establishment of a W3C group dedicated to web standards for music notation.

I am a retired professional programmer and professor of Computer Science, and a hobby musician.
For the past several years I have been working on producing sheet music as “text”,
including as text on a webpage.
A chronicle of my investigations is posted on my website, DrTechDaddy.com, in the MUSIC blog.

I am currently investigating using text on HTLM Canvas as a vehicle for music notation.
The model I use for music text is “klavarskribo:”   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo,
a notation related to player piano-rolls, originally invented to be producible with a sort of “musical typewriter”.
It features a vertical staff with pitches arranged horizontally on a line, and is therefore quite amenable to 
treating the music as “text”.
I have also been using a distinct glyph for each of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, a version of “shape notes” for the chromatic scale, in the spirit of “Sacred Harp” and other shape-note systems.

I have also been following the activities of the Music Notation Project: 
http://musicnotation.org 
musicnotation@googlegroups.com
This project is focused on alternative music notations,
with emphasis on “isomorphic” notations with 12 distinct “staff” positions per “octave”, one for each tone of the chromatic scale, rather than the traditional seven positions based on the diatonic scale.  

I believe standards should be flexible enough to support experimentation with novel notations as well as represent traditional notation.

In my efforts to produce some semblance of music on a webpage,
I have been frustrated by the lack of facilities in HTML to control absolute positioning of text elements and characters.
Also, I have discovered some browser anomalies in whitespace and character overlap handling when attempting to overlap or kern “note” glyphs, attach distinct colors to individual glyphs, and control vertical spacing on a page.
Also, restrictions on access to third-party websites for music fonts etc. by javascript limits the otherwise significant flexibility of using javascript with canvas to create sheet music.

I’m also interested in how these effort may interact with “WebAssembly” and successors to MIDI file standards.

I would appreciate your guidance as to how I might best offer my ideas and talents to your music efforts.
For example, might I “join” your organization, and if so, how do I further participate?

I am acting on my own behalf; I am not affiliated with an institution, either commercial or non-profit.
I am not seeking monetary compensation; but neither do I have significant financial resources for travel, etc.

Joseph Austin, PhD
DrTechDaddy.com
DrTechDaddy@gmail.com

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2015 00:25:02 UTC