--------
Guido remarked:
| So, to sum up: I think we should spend our time improving and completing
| abc, instead of writing convertion tools of questionable value. IMHO.
This is rather similar to the ongoing debate between plain text and
all the various proprietary word-processor document formats. At first
glance, word processors look flashy and impressive. But only people
with compatible software can read them. And in a very few years,
those fancy documents will become unreadable as new versions of the
word processor programs come out. But plain ascii text from 30 years
ago is readable just about anywhere, and will be readable a century
from now. These are some of the reasons that so many people keep
insisting on plain text in public mailing lists and archives.
Still, conversion programs can be very useful. There are a lot of
files in proprietary formats (text and music) that will be lost in a
few years. But if we have conversion programs to extract the
significant content, we will at least be able to recover something
from these old files. You have to write the conversion programs while
the fancy format is in active use. If you wait, you'll find that the
files are unreadable and nobody knows the format any more.
A lot of the world's documents over the past few decades are becoming
unreadable, and we're losing much of our history. This will happen
with all the proprietary music formats, too, just as it has happened
with proprietary document formats.
Formatting isn't important, and if we lose it, we don't lose much.
The important thing is the information content. ABC's minimal
formatting is, in the long run, not really a disadvantage. But we'll
want to be able to get at the musical information in 10 or 50 or 500
years, and with ABC, this is fairly easy. In the long run, this is
one of the real values of formats like ABC.
One of the encouraging things here is that most of the discussions of
new ABC features have been about musical information rather than
formatting. Even examples such as "^text" fall into this category.
True, this ^ is positioning information, but it also has a useful
value: It flags the quoted string as being not a chord, but rather as
annotation associated with a note. One of the problems with current
ABC is the "abuse" of the chord notation to get annotations of
various sorts on the printed page. It's difficult for software to
tell that "Amin" and "Sfz" are different sorts of things. If the
latter always looks like "^Fine" or "_Da Capo", then software can
easily tell that this isn't a chord, and can look it up in a table of
known annotations. This is musical information, although it comes
with a bit of positioning information, and in the long run, it's
musically useful.
ABC has a real role as a minimal, bare-bones, just-the-music sort of
notation. Like plain ascii text, it will likely be around and useful
long after all the current proprietary music formats are unreadable.
But conversions to ABC will then be very useful.
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