John Chambers wrote:
>... meanwhile, back at the ranch, there have been more reports of
>problems with my Tune Finder not being able to format some ABC files
>sensibly. There are two sorts of problems. One is just flakey ABC,
>especially the tunes buried inside HTML (which often produces some
>"interesting" modernistic music). The other is the files that use
>useful extensions of ABC that my version of abc2ps doesn't grok.
>
>So. Just how many variants are out there now, and where's the latest
>version of each? I'm getting really tempted to grab a copy of each
>and attempt to merge them into one version that will accept most of
>the ABC that's lying about on the Web.
>
>Others can get as doctrinaire as they like about how nobody needs any
>of those obscure ABC features. But speaking only for myself, the code
>I have works over the Web, and so what I need is ABC tools that work
>with stuff on the Web. It needs to be as accepting as I can make it,
>even with music that I don't myself play. I'll let the rest of y'all
>dispute whether features are needed or right; I'll just work on
>hacking up a formatter that does its best to deal with whatever it
>comes across.
>
>(And while I'm at it, I think I'll work on documenting the internals
>of that sucker. ;-)
>
There's not a lot you can do about the flakey tunes, but what proportion
of tune requests fail because of the second reson? It would seem that
that statistic, along with a good sample of failibg tunes would be an
excellent pointer to where we need to concentrate in standardising abc.
Phil Taylor
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