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

Hi Joe, Group,

	Before ruling out the idea of transforming the XML I would like to point out that this is a very powerful and useful idea, and incidentally central to the operation of SeeScore, for which MusicXML is its document format, and I hope MNX will become so in the future.

	By regarding a set of edits as a stream of recordable (and undoable) transformations you can implement layered annotations to a score in an elegant and economical way (with the help of UIDs coming in MusicXML 3.1). So for instance the Music Director of a group can make a set of annotations to an (immutable) source XML document - these can be distributed with the document to the group of players/singers, who can then make their own annotations. The source document being the same for everybody, it can be instantly viewed in case of uncertainty about the original composer's intention. The individual annotations could even be coloured according to the person who made them. Each individual edit is regarded as a transform which can be recorded in a simple and economical textual format (eg XML/JSON) and applied to the document

	However, I think the perceived difficulty of transforming the XML is overstated. MNX as envisaged so far is perfectly suited to this sort of operation, as long as it has the possibility of recording UIDs in elements.

regards
James Sutton
Dolphin Computing
http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk <http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk/>
http://www.seescore.co.uk <http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk/>
http://www.playscore.co <http://www.dolphin-com.co.uk/>