One of those other Johns wrote: | On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, John Chambers wrote: | > I have no control over what people put on their web sites, so I have a | > strong incentive to use "Be liberal in what you accept" as a major | > rule. | | I disagree, both with this rule and with the idea that you have no | influence over how people choose to write their ABC. By your own words, | the reason this problem exists is because of the widespread use of | software that has casually accepted the use of "-" as a slur without | complaint -- i.e., software that has been too liberal. So in effect, you | have chosen to become part of the problem, rather than the solution!
Yes; I can understand this argument. But I'd classify it as a "red herring". Why? Well, consider what it would take for the typical user to use my ABC Tune Finder to verify their own tunes. You can't just point it at your file; you need to get your file into its index. So you have to create at least one (and probably a dozen or so) ABC files with titles like "T: Test Tune 1" and so on. You put them into a directory in your web site and send me the URL. Some time within the next few weeks, I'll run my search program, and then your files will be in my indexes. After waiting several weeks, you can go to the Tune Finder and type in "Test Tune", and it'll find your tunes. You can now edit your file(s), ask for it to be downloaded in PS or MIDI or whatever format, and see whether it works. If it does, you won't see any possible warning messages, because you only get a pointer to the log file if the conversion fails. This is exceedingly clumsy, and I'd be frankly surprised if there's anyone on the Net who does it. I certainly don't, although I have easy access to all its innards. It's far better to simply fetch one or two of the many ABC tools and install them on your own machine. You get a lot more functionality, and much faster response. (Granted, someone knowledgeable about the Web can invoke my conversion programs directly. This was a conscious part of my design. Some people have done this, and I even have a page explaining how to do it. This could be used to validate and convert ABC files. But still, I suspect that nobody is routinely using it this way. You're much better off installing ABC software on your own machine. My CGI scripts are really only useful when invoked from a web page.) | At the very least, I think that using "-" as a slur should result in a | clear *warning* to the user that the ABC standard discourages this | practice, and it is not guaranteed to work with other ABC software. Then | I suppose you could be as liberal as you want in idiot-proofing your | software without much risk of further exacerbating the problem. Most musicians don't understand the distinction between a tie and a slur. You could argue that there isn't really a distinction. A "slur" means to play the notes without articulating any but the first. When you do this with two identical notes, they merge into one note, and that's what we call a "tie". So a tie is just a special case of a slur, not a different musical thing. The usual staff notation that represents them (nearly) identically is based on this understanding. It's really the ABC representation that's misleading, implying that ties and slurs are different things. It would be better for ABC to officially go along with the usual musical convention, and just say that the "tie" notation is shorthand for a two-note "slur", and for identical notes, causes them to merge into a single long note. This is how ties are implemented in a lot of software already, and it's a very useful way to do it. | > I don't want to waste my time responding to users' complaints about my | > web site bombing for ABC that works elsewhere. | | I can respect this, but at the same time, I don't feel that it justifies | "dumbing down" the standard to the lowest common denominator. It's nearly impossible for me to "dumb down" ABC. If you subscribe to some of the musical mailing lists that use ABC, you'll quickly see what I mean. The quality of much of the posted ABC is abysmally low, and dumb syntax errors are rife. People routinely use English text for information that belongs in the headers, because they can't be bothered to learn about any headers except T, M and K. And they get those wrong with amazing frequency. It would be difficult for me to write software that encourages anything worse. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
