MNX: why use CSS?

Hi Matt,

It's a great question. The main reasons for using CSS in MNX have little to
do with the web per se.

I will give two:

1. CSS's powerful selector syntax can describe conditions under which one
or more style properties apply to one or more set of elements in a document.

Please see this document for a thorough explanation of selectors:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-css3-selectors-20110929/

2. While stylesheets can be included verbatim within a single document
(i.e. they can be self contained), this causes a set of common definitions
-- like a publishing house style -- to be duplicated many times in a
collection of documents. Sometimes, but not always, it is useful to be able
to break them out and include modular stylesheets that apply to an multiple
documents.

With respect to your point (and attached examples) about structural fixes
to MusicXML I believe the MNX document makes a special effort to address
these.

There are others but I believe those are the main reasons.

Best,

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
Founder
Noteflight LLC

49R Day Street
Somerville MA 02144
USA

"Bring music to life"
www.noteflight.com

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 11:18 AM, Matthew James Briggs <
matthew.james.briggs@gmail.com> wrote:

> Joe, thank you for all the hard work you are doing.
>
> I am new to the MusicXML community so sorry that this hasn't been brought
> up earlier.  I do not see the advantage of intermingling CSS within a music
> notation data exchange format.  Many of the consumers of MusicXML are C++
> applications (MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, Lilypond, Dorico, Logic Pro,
> etc).  We should not cause C++ music programs to parse CSS and respond like
> a web browser would.
>
> I believe the files should be self contained and stick to a single
> language (xml).  Although I'm sure it would be convenient for web
> developers to put CSS into the documents, I believe it would *only* benefit
> web applications.  We shouldn't, for example, put C code into the
> specification because that would *only* benefit C/C++ applications.
>
> Can it can be demonstrated that applications like Finale, Sibelius,
> Dorico, MuseScore and Lilypond benefit from CSS in a way that the xml data
> alone cannot provide?  Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing that
> you can do with CSS that couldn't be done instead by encoding the desired
> results into the xml spec.
>
> My vision for what needs to happen to improve music notation interchange
> would be more along the lines of taking what we have with MusicXML, and
> re-organizing it into a more deterministic and hierarchical structure (more
> nesting, less reliance on previously-encountered-context when parsing,
> possibly sacrificing some freedom to make it easier to use).  See attached
> for what I mean about structure.
>
> Again, thanks for all the hard work.
> Matt
>
> p.s.
>
> Another, less fundamental, suggestion that I have regards the use of
> strings like "3/8*".  Once we pull values out of the XML, I don't think
> that those values should require further string parsing (i.e. for example
> find the slash, separate the numbers, then count the number of asterisks at
> the end).  Instead I would recommend that such constructs be encoded
> atomically, e.g. <top>3</top><bottom>8</bottom><dots>1</dots> like
> MusicXML does.
>
> .mjb
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 7:33 AM, Joe Berkovitz <joe@noteflight.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Jeremy,
>>
>> Yes, there absolutely will be example scores.
>>
>> I have so far held off in order to avoid "example thrash" since
>> converting a set of convincingly complex scores is non-trivial labor, and I
>> think some of the structural underpinnings of MNX are not settled enough. I
>> think once we get an initial round of feedback (the next several weeks?)
>> then it will make sense to get on this.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> .            .       .    .  . ...Joe
>>
>> Joe Berkovitz
>> Founder
>> Noteflight LLC
>>
>> 49R Day Street
>> Somerville MA 02144
>> USA
>>
>> "Bring music to life"
>> www.noteflight.com
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 8:55 PM, Jeremy Sawruk <jeremy.sawruk@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Will there be a repository of (public domain or properly licensed)
>>> example scores for MNX, the way there is for MusicXML? If so, I would
>>> suggest putting this somewhere in the MNX Github, either as a folder within
>>> the MNX Github, or as a separate Github repository.
>>>
>>> I have already started to write an MNX document. I think that I will be
>>> writing more MNX documents in the future that I would like to share with
>>> the community.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>
>>
>