--------
Nigel Gatherer writes:
| I received an email this morning:
|
| > Please help me if you can. I have the ABC Win program. I would like
| > to download your music, but for some reason when I select it the
| > program opens but is empty. what is the correct process?
|
| This prompts me to seek a proper solution to my storage of ABC files.
|
| I don't have ABCWin (or any other ABC translation programs), so I can't
| test out my files. At the moment I store all my ABC tunes as Data files
| with a ".abc" suffix. I think the only other option is to store them as
| text files. May I ask others' opinions?
Well, the software I have can't find any problems with your files.
But I suspect there might be some truth to the suggestion that
sending them correctly as text/vnd.abc is the source of some
problems. You'd think that web software would at least do the obvious
thing if it doesn't recognize the vnd.abc subtype: "Well, the main
type is text, so I'll just treat it as text/plain." This is
apparently too sophisticated for the folks who write browsers,
though, and it's never done.
I've tried to help several people set up IE to handle ABC, and I've
seen all sorts of bizarre and inexplicable behavior. One thing that
seems to be common is for people to think as above, and try to tell
IE to just treat it as plain text. I'm not quite sure what the
details are, but there's a way to say "handle it yourself". What this
seems to do is to throw IE into an infinite loop, and once you're
there, there doesn't seem to be any way to back out of the disaster.
Unfortunately, one of the outcomes of this is that a lot of people
have decided that the solution is to send abc as text/plain. This has
the advantage of working with all browsers without any configuring.
But it means that you are masking the nature of the abc files, and
preventing knowledgeable users (or users with better designed
browsers ;-) from using abc plugins or helper apps.
I recently downloaded the latest version of mozilla. The first time I
clicked on a link to an abc file, I got a little popup window that
asked me what I wanted to do with it. I filled in the "application"
widget with the name of a little tcl gui tool that I wrote, hit the
OK button, and my little gui window popped up with the ABC in its
text window. Just like I expected.
Now if I could only learn a foolproof way of getting a Windows user
out of trouble when they've tried to handle ABC files and find their
browser going insane ...
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