At 10:14 PM 1/2/2001 +0000, John Chambers wrote:
>Maybe we should just quietly do away with the "header" vs "music"
>distinction. There are "header lines" and "music lines", which can be
>in any order that makes sense. ......
This is such a lively discussion that I felt I must really get my oar in
the water as well.
Do away with the "header" vs "music" distinction??! That a radical idea,
but not radical enough.
In case you guys haven't noticed, there is a revolution happening right now
called the "Internet" and at the heart of it is a thing called XML. If you
ever want ABC to have any kind of widespread acceptance you MUST be XML
compatible. I used to scorn XML because I didn't understand it. XML is
not HTML, it is far superior and far more useful than HTML. see
http://www.w3.org/XML/
Instead of
V: soprano
you've got to have
<voice id=soprano>
..... contents of the voice .....
</voice>
I know that the syntax is a little revolting, but it has two HUGE advantages.
#1 -- it is XML compatible, therefore ABC will be immediately compatible
with thousands of parsers and browsers and tools.
#2 -- it has a very clean, logical, and extensible syntax.
I know that people are going to start whining "What about all my legacy
code and legacy data?" No problem. Just write a little perl script to
convert all your data. And the code? Just rewrite it. Well designed
software should be easy to rewrite. If it isn't well designed, then throw
it away and start over.
John Henckel alt. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, USA (507) 753-2216
http://geocities.com/jdhenckel/
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