Laura Conrad wrote:
>>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>>>>
>
> Richard> ie, if xml gives access to worthwhile stuff, how about an abc2xml
> Richard> converter ?
>
>
> But as far as *I* know, it doesn't. Does anyone know differently?
Personally, I think XML is completely wrong for ABC -- the two have very
different aims, as has been said before. The point of ABC is that an
ordinary human can stand to write an ABC file -- it's concise and even
sort of looks like "standard" notation, with .'s for staccato and |'s
for barlines and A's for A's and so forth. XML takes the opposite
approach and tries to be easily readable by a computer while still being
a text format so that the layout is pretty clear and humans can read it
if they have to.
<ramble>
The basic advantage of XML, as I see it, is that it's a nice standard
file format for which you don't have to write yet another parser. As
I'm sure many ABC developers out there can assure you, ABC is not the
world's easiest-to-parse file format if you want to get _all_ the
information out of the file. There are lots of good, fast XML parsers
out there, and if you want to (say) quickly build an application that
computes the total length of a MusicML file or extracts out the first
part or whatever, it's really easy to write a little Java app or XSLT
stylesheet or whatever to do that for you. Try doing the above with
ABC, and it's not too easy. Another nice advantage of XML is that it's
easily translatable into other (XML- or text-based) file formats. Thus
translating from, say, MusicML to ABC would be fairly straightforward
via an XSLT stylesheet, but doing the opposite would be comparatively hard.
</ramble>
So, I certainly don't think ABC should be recasted in XML because it
would lose its wonderful property of human-readability (and
writability!), but as Richard suggested, something to translate ABC into
some sort of XML-based file format (it doesn't really matter which one)
would probably be handy.
Thanks for reading this far! :)
- Eric
--
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"God is real, unless // Name: // Eric Galluzzo // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
declared integer." // WWW: // http://w3.one.net/~eng/
-- Unknown // Work: // Synchrony // Product Engineer
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