Re: MNX Proposal now Available [via Music Notation Community Group]

>     I bet that MNX stands for Music Notation XML, and then what you
>     want to save is the notation, not the music itself (otherwise you
>     would use an approach more similar to MIDI).
>
> Not bad, and you didn't even have to read the spec!  :-)
But I read the one of MusicXML. And I wrote a MusicXML parser and a
Java-2-MusicXML converter in Android. And I may write another for MNX in
the future.
>
> Yes, this is about saving a score, which is instructions on how to
> perform music, as distinct from music itself.
>
>     And in my experience as a programmer I also think that XML is not
>     a very good format to support "operations" (move a note to another
>     measure, etc.), only serialize and de-serialize. I think the XML
>     should be transformed to a object structure in memory and the
>     operations should be performed to those objects, then saved again.
>     And here you can choose to save all the XML again or replace only
>     the one referred by the objects that have changed, but that is a
>     matter to decide by every software developer (for example, my
>     Kunkunshi Editor saves everything again as the XML parser I use is
>     very simple).
>
>From an informational point of view they are they are not completely the
same. A human-readable music score is more than the instructions really
needed to perform music. There are elements that are purely
organizational (e.g.: the measures) and others that are merely
aesthetic. You don't really need them to perform music, and they are
actually introducing a certain complexity that could be avoided, that is
why Dr. Hörnel argued the possibility of not having them.

And actually... that is my case. When I wrote the aforementioned
MusicXML parser, I did it for Kunkunshi Editor, an editor of Okinawan
music. Okinawan music is NOT represented in the western fashion with
staves and measures, but with a different system called Kunkunshi (工工四).
So I also found all those organizational and aesthetic elements
completely unnecessary for my use case. And when I write the parser for
MNX in the future, it will happen again. But I understand that this tiny
and infrequent use case, as medieval music notation, will be out of the
scope of your standard.
> As you say, one shouldn't use XML itself to perform these operations
> (and I hope no one does).
>
> Standard modern practice is to parse XML into memory using a Document
> Object Model (DOM) parser and manipulate the in-memory structure via
> the DOM API -- a web standard, see
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model.
> It can then be serialized back out.
>
> This practice is so ubiquitous that web programmers like me will talk
> in terms of manipulating the document, when what we really mean is
> manipulating the DOM in memory!
>
> ...Joe
Yes I know what a DOM parser is, I am tired of programming them. But
when I read Dr. Hörnel's email it looked like somebody was opening the
door to directly perform operations there. I am glad you clarified that
is not the case.

Best regards,

Rafa