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Bryan writes:
| I will, but as I have said, abc is useless as an exchange medium if we ar=
| e=20
| not all talking the same language.
Well, now, it seems to me that this is disproved by even a casual
glance at the current situation. There is a fairly significant range
of discrepancy in how various abc tools implement various parts of
the notation. If the above were true, then abc as it is now would be
useless. But a lot of people are finding it very useful.
The claim that abc must be a consistenly-implemented standard is a
red herring. This isn't true at all, just as it isn't true for any of
the other standards in the computing industry. Standards are never
implemented consistently by different developers. And some
widely-used tools (such as unix ;-) have radically different
implementations on different platforms, while still being very
useful.
This isn't just ranting. Claiming that we *MUST* all step to the same
drummer is actually a way of suppressing innovation. If ABC is kept
in a little box and developers are discouraged from experimenting
with extensions, then it will be forever frozen at its current state.
It will remain useful for a few kinds of music, but will never
develop into a more generally useful notation.
ABC was a very useful start on a simple, human-readable and emailable
music notation. It was limited, and saying this is no criticism of
Chris's work. Good tools often start off simple and limited, and grow
with time to include new capabilities. But this growth hardly ever
happens with a central dictatorial control. It happens if you have a
lot of interested developers who feel they have the freedom to try
out new ideas and present them to the user community.
Keeping abc in a straightjacket by insisting that we must all be
talking the same language will in the long run be fatal, and will
relegate abc to the fringe. That may be the intention of some. But
there are a lot of kinds of music in this world, and musicians don't
talk the same language at all. I'd rather see abc continue to develop
as a user-accessible, emailable music notation that more musicians
can use. This requires that we accept variations and extensions, and
that we discuss them with the idea of developing ABC into a more
widely-usable notation.
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