--------
Frank Nordberg wrote:
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| > Wendy Galovich says -
| > > That being the case, Brian, then the first thing I'd do is put
| > > those abcs out on the site in plain text format, rather than, or at
| > > least in addition to the zipped files...
| >
| > You are absolutely right.
|
| Great.
While we're on this topic, I might make another suggestion that I've
made to a number of people in private. As the one who did the ABC
tune finder, one thing I'm aware of is how much better it is for my
search program if people put all their abc files into an abc
directory (and midi files into a midi directory and so on). That way,
my search program doesn't have to grovel through all those other
kinds of files to find the abc. I'd guess that those interested in
midi would make the same suggestion. Having a few html pages to
present the list to people is a good idea, of course, but a lot of
software would be happier if there were subdirectories for the
different kinds of files.
This is really just a suggestion, since everyone is always free to
organize their web pages however they like. Some people find it
easier to keep related files in the same directory, with the suffix
as the discriminator. That's reasonable, too, so it really is up to
you to decide what works best for your own uses. But one thing to
take into consideration is that there's a growing body of software
Out There that uses the web to access data. It's not just people at
browsers. Software tends to grovel through html files, follow links,
and examine everything they point to.
So far, I've intentionally ignored the question of ABC in compressed
archive files. My indexing code doesn't try to decompress anything.
This is partly because my tune finder and the associated conversion
scripts are running in a guest account on a machine at MIT's EE dept.
It's a free account, and while they so far seem to be encouraging of
me and others doing such things, I don't want to make it too heavy a
load on the machine. Dealing with compression would be a significant
increase in the machine's load. So I've just viewed compressed files
as files that the owner doesn't want searched or indexed. I've had a
few questions about this, and so far that's been my answer. This may
change with time, of course. But one of abc's advertised points is
that the files are small and download quickly. Compressing them seems
somewhat pointless, but if someone wants to do it, who am I to tell
them otherwise?. For the foreseeable future, I'll just continue to
treat compressed abc files as "hidden" data. If you want your tunes
to be searchable and findable by users, you should put them up in
plain text.
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