Re: Semantically enhanced SVG (proposal)

Hi James,

This proposal is not new, and the chair's previous invitation to any
interested subgroup stands. It's fine if a subgroup of people want to
develop a clearer notion of how SVG might be annotated with musical
semantic and performance data.

However, I must echo Jeremy's feelings on the issues. I do not believe this
approach will address most of the use cases that we've already catalogued.
It only "future-proofs" the graphical angle of music representation, and
will yield documents that are visually rigid and merely reflect a specific,
original graphical rendering. This defect is a big problem for CMN use
cases, and in general I believe it's true for any notational idiom whose
rules are sufficiently abstract to permit many possible visual realizations.

Now, there *are* clear advantages to connecting the markup representing *a
specific SVG rendering* of a musical document back to the semantics that
generated it. But the fact that Verovio, or Noteflight, or other notation
rendering systems actually produce such annotated SVG does not, in itself,
argue in favor of adopting SVG as a central construct for music
representation. Nor does it argue specifically for MEI, MusicXML 3.0, or
any of the existing semantic formats that produce such annotations tody. It
merely says: there's value in being able to map a given rendering to
elements of its original document (and perhaps this is a more attainable
and worthwhile goal of the concept). Given the fact that notational
semantics are inherently non-tree-structured, I doubt that it is easy to
make the rendering include all the original information, though.

Best,
​
...Joe