Gianni Cunich writes:
| Sorry, but I actually got bored about the discussion about the abc2midi
|behaviour...so bored I actually felt sick!
...
| The "real" problem, IMO, is a totally different one: is there anybody who actually
|cares about the respect of the standard anymore?
|
| I assume the answer is: no... except fot those who actually think to be in charge of
|its update! Pity the rest of us parias is still waiting for "news from the front"...
Well, I can certainly sympathise. As the one who foisted the abc tune
finder on the web, I see an impressive variety of what passes for
abc. A number of email exchanges have verified that some people have
little if any interest in following any supposed standard.
Just a few days ago, I was asked why www.irishtunes.net isn't very
well represented in the tune finder's indexes. There are actually a
few of their files included, but many of them aren't. I spent a fun
hour or so just yesterday looking around the site, and was truly
impressed by how badly someone can mangle abc, apparently
intentionally. It's like they studied a number of abc tools with the
goal of producing abc that wouldn't work with any of them.
All their tunes are embedded in html, for starters, which accounts
for most of the problems. Some of the tunes are "double spaced",
typically by using <p> as line separators. Lines are broken in all
sorts of weird places, such as within :| and :: symbols. Some is such
bizarre html that my poor little parser gives up in bewilderment. And
most of the tunes were produced by abc2win, which seems be the
current record holder for gratuitous violations of the standard
(though it does have some competition for the title).
OTOH, there are many good reasons for nonstandard abc. These reasons
may be characterised by the term "extension". The existing abc
standard is rather limited, and a great many musicians have decided
that they won't live with the problems. I'm one of the growing crowd
that has branched abc2ps so that I can represent music outside the
folk tradition of the British Isles. Much as I love that sort of
music, I have to admit that abc's limitations make it a poor tool for
the other 99% of the world's music, some of which I also like to
play. Most of the people making changes aren't actually changing the
semantics of abc; they are adding new features to cover music that
can't be done right in abc.
We aren't going to stop this process. All we can do is try to keep
things from diverging, and try to get the extensions implemented more
widely. ABC is just too useful, and attracts musicians who learn
about it. Then they hit its limitations, and the open source software
means they can solve their problems. But the effort to incorporate
extensions into a new standard hasn't progressed all that far. The
effort so far has been to make a stricter definition of the existing
standard. This is itself of much value, of course, and has clarified
a lot of ambiguities, but it hasn't yet led to standardizing things
outside that standard.
Anyhow, as the keeper of the tune finder, what I've been working on
in my spare time is to make my abc2ps clone capable of handling as
much of the variant abc as I can manage. Most of it seems doable,
since few of the extensions are actually in conflict. I haven't made
much of a fuss over this; I just find tunes that don't work, I hack
up a solution, and a few more tunes now work. Again, the big problem
is the abc2win tunes, which are usually not identified as such within
the tune, and which do change the semantics of some things. But I've
got enough working that when people complain that some file on the
web "doesn't work", I can often tell them to go to my tune finder and
ask it to produce the PS or GIF or whatever, and it usually works.
I sure do wish we could get abc2win in line with the standard. And
that we could get people to stop embedding abc in html. Those two
things would solve most of the existing problems with online abc. But
I already know the answer to both of those.
(One funny thing is to hear people justifying abc-in-html by saying
that "HTML is the standard for the Web." How do you argue against
such a fundamental misunderstanding? ;-)
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