Bob Archer wrote: | At 04:09 AM 2/6/2002 UTC, John Chambers wrote: | >What seems to have happened is more or less consistent with the past | >work on abc. The (semi-official) standards committee started with the | >idea that what it needed was a clear formulation of abc version 1.6 | >as a standard, and has worked on codifying that. ... | | I'd agree with this if the standards committee was actually producing | anything at all, but as far as I can tell they're not. I don't think | we've even been able to get a statement out of the committee as to | whether the committee exists or not (which I guess is one of those | questions where a non-answer also answers the question). Given that | the 1.6 standard has been out for years and not been superceded my | suspicion is that the standards folks will never catch up.
Maybe. I am (was ;-) on the committee, and I haven't heard many peeps lately. I don't consider myself one of the "drivers", as I'm clearly one of those radical types who thinks that abc should be extended to handle other kinds of music. Anyhow, I wonder how many proposed ABC standards we have now? I have a copy that's probably a bit dated at: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/abc-draft.txt How many others are online? I suspect that the ABC standards effort have branched more than has abc2ps. One of my favorite wise-ass quips is: One of the great things about standards is that we have so many to choose from. Some time back, I started work on something different: A sort of "ABC extension summary" that includes whatever public standard info I can get my hands on, plus whatever I can learn about existing and proposed extensions. I haven't mentioned this to anyone, partly because it's mostly for my own sanity. But maybe I should make it public, and see if I can get a discussion going about how specific musical ideas can best be handled within abc's narrow focus. One part of this is online: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/ABCtut_Features.html You'll note, however, that most of the spaces are blank. I suspect that the non-black spaces might not all still be accurate. It's not easy to maintain up-to-date info on such things. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
