Getting Off The Ground [via Music Notation Community Group]

Hi Group Members,

Thanks for your patience during the Northern-summer vacation season as things
slowed down and many were out of town and offline. Even so, many new members and
organizations continued to join the Music Notation CG, bringing the total count
to an impressive 191.

Now, we’re finally at the point of getting started and actually doing
something. With this post, the co-chairs hope to set a rough agenda for lots of
good work to come. It’s also an opportunity to ask the membership to supply
thoughts on a number of points where your input will be very helpful.

SO... NOW WHAT?

Let’s begin by reviewing some of the main areas in which we hope this CG can
make progress. Of course we can’t do everything at once, although we can
pursue some limited set of goals in parallel. We’ve broken these up into
short-term projects that we think can be completed in the coming 6 to 12 months,
and longer-term projects that can begin to be addressed in parallel with the
short-term work, perhaps by separate subgroups within the CG.

SHORT TERM PROJECTS

Build an initial MusicXML specification. The aim of this initial document is
tactical in nature: it needs to resolve the most significant ambiguities and
gaps faced by developers working with the current version of MusicXML. It should
also provide a framework for later, more complete specifications, and can serve
as a version-controlled container for new MusicXML features going forward. This
initial spec will be incomplete by design, though, and will still
coexist/overlap with the current XSD documentation.

Add support for use of SMuFL glyphs within MusicXML. MusicXML needs to include
some new constructs and documentation that allow SMuFL glyphs to be employed
usefully. The symbolic vocabulary of MusicXML must grow to support some new
SMuFL notations. MusicXML must also be able to specify the use of SMuFL glyphs
in already-supported notations (e.g. “use this SMuFL notehead for this
note”). More fundamentally, MusicXML must define the manner in which SMuFL
glyphs are joined to each other and registered with respect to relative or
default X/Y locations.

Identify and fix any remaining gaps or adoption barriers in SMuFL. We are at a
point in this venture at which any serious problems or barriers to adoption need
to be identified and fixed in SMuFL. It will be hard or impossible to fix such
problems later.

Document music notation use cases. We need to begin to develop a separate
document that covers and prioritizes the use cases that the CG’s work will
support, to aid in evaluating the many alternative proposals and solutions that
will come up.

LONGER TERM PROJECTS

Improving formatting support in MusicXML. MusicXML 3.0 formatting cannot easily
be shared between documents. Nor can it distinguish formatting that clarifies
semantics, such as for collision avoidance, from formatting that is more a
matter of house style, such as font choices and spacing preferences. Could CSS
stylesheets help solve these issues and provide more powerful formatting support
for a wider variety of use cases? 

Build a complete MusicXML specification document. A long-standing MusicXML
community request has been  to build a complete specification. This would
replace the XML Schema as a specification and address holistic or cross-cutting
matters that do not belong to any single schema component.

Adding Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation and interactivity to MusicXML.
What would it take to be able to create interactive music applications on top of
any standard MusicXML rendering engine? MusicXML was not designed with DOM
interactivity in mind. Is the current document structure sufficient, perhaps
with some minor adjustments? Or does the use of a time cursor that can move
forward and backward, combined with the current structure, inhibit DOM
interactivity? Would this  require a more structural solution such as
revisiting the MusicXML element hierarchy? 

WHAT’S NEXT?

This is where the co-chairs can use your help. We’d like to ask you to answer
the following questions:

 Are these the right major goals? What’s missing? What should go?
 Are we picking the correct short-term projects to start with?
 Have we defined the short-term projects properly?
 What would you most like to see done with MusicXML right away?
 What would you most like to see done with SMuFL right away?

At this point we are looking for input from the membership. It’s tempting to
indulge in a wide-ranging debate, but at this stage it’s going to be difficult
to reach a conclusion through a large email discussion. So we want to begin by
hearing people’s thoughts. Please send your thoughts to the contributor
mailing list at public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org.

Thank you again for your interest in the Music Notation Community Group. We are
looking forward to hearing your thoughts as to how you would like the group to
proceed.

Joe Berkovitz
Michael Good
Daniel Spreadbury



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This post sent on Music Notation Community Group



'Getting Off The Ground'

https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/2015/09/17/getting-off-the-ground/



Learn more about the Music Notation Community Group: 

https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation

Received on Thursday, 17 September 2015 14:22:01 UTC