--------
Frank Nordberg wrote:
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| > Formatting isn't important, and if we lose it, we don't lose much.
| > The important thing is the information content.
|
| Yes, but in music notation it's usually impossible to draw a clear line
| between information content and formatting.
Your right there. This was why I mentioned the proposed "^text" sort
of extension. But an even better example is the fact that, in
standard staff notation, the note heads mostly all look the same.
It's their position that tells you their relative pitch and start
time. (Though curiously, the stop time is indicated differently.)
This is a clear case of formatting information that carries musical
information.
This is also one of the several ways that ABC differs significantly
from staff notation, since ABC uses letters rather than physical
position to indicate a note's pitch (and a number rather than a flag
to indicate duration).
We wouldn't be able to eliminate all formatting information, for this
sort of reason. And some simple formatting information is just too
useful to discard. Thus, staff ends are useful, even if you don't
play them. For that matter, you don't play bar lines, either; they
are primarily to make the music more readable. Even these could be
eliminated without loss of much musical information content.
But the basic principle is still worth noting: In the long run, it's
the musical information that is of most value. Formatting information
is of secondary importance, and will be routinely ignored or changed
by many users anyway. The most important topic is how we represent
the musical information. A bit of formatting is ok, but we shouldn't
pay it much attention.
This is also similar to the text world. I've seen a number of remarks
from writers to the effect that they hate word processors, and prefer
simple text editors. Why? Well, one journalist I heard recently just
pointed out that his "product" is words. Formatting is done by the
folks in the print shop, and he is quite happy to let them handle
that part of the job. Not that he won't discuss it with them or
criticise them at times. But his emphasis is on writing, and all he
wants is a simple way to produce a string of words that others can
read. Word processors are complex and distracting, and produce text
that can only be read by a few people with the same sort of software.
Only a few experts can do much with the text. Plain text can be sent
to anyone, and they can format it however they wish to make it look
nice on whatever sort of surface they are reading it from.
ABC's niche, if it has one in the long term, should be similar. We
should let the folks building the fancy music processing software
worry about things such as formatting. What we should concentrate on
is the musical information, in a form that is as easy to type and
read as we can make it. One goal should be to make it easy for other
music software to read ABC, and to generate it. Then ABC will
function as a medium of exchange between programs that can't read
each others' file formats.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
