[ ordinarily I do not attribute posters I respond to, but this is such mind-blowingly offensive, arrogant, counterproductive authoritarian shite that no way could I ever forget the name of the author or want it mistakenly attributed to anybody else ]
Steven Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The whole idea (and the goal any standards maker should be working > towards) is to provide a mechanism and incentive for both the content > developer and the tools developer to implement and stick to the new > standard. [...] > The incentive for the content developer to put these in is twofold -- > First, if they stick to the new standard, their content should work > with ANY ABC2 compliant app. Second, since the old parser isn't > being further developed (and shouldn't be, IMHO...), if they want to > use any ABC 2.0 or later feature or different syntax, they *must* > put in the version tag and comply with that spec, or that feature or > different syntax won't be recognized. > It's important to establish that this tag isn't a comment or > a suggestion to the user or tool -- it's a clear, unequivocal > statement: "The following tune conforms *strictly* to the ABC > 2.0 spec, and if you find it doesn't, throw the tune out with > an error". And it's absence is another clear statement: "The > following tune is pre-2.0, so try to parse it as best as you > can, and definitely do NOT allow any 2.0 specific features". You are completely and fundamentally confused about the whole purpose of a musical notation. It is to mediate communication of artistic creations between human beings. The fact that a computer might be used as a transport medium is secondary. We are not writing for an audience of machines. Every musical notation there has ever been has been adapted by people who needed something different to express what they needed to say, and weren't prepared to wait for a committee to approve them saying it. If the computer is simply going to sit there as a censor stopping me saying what I want, well, fuck the computer, I can write ABC on paper perfectly well (and have done, I have a stack of notebooks of it). What will actually happen: people will write within certified standard syntaxes up to the point where they need more. Then they either turn off the flag that enables the standard checks, or if the application won't let them, ditch it and find one that will. And if I find that some implementor is playing manipulative games with me that not only affect what I can write but also what I can retain and use of what other people have written, then not only will I not use their crappy program myself, I will shout from the rooftops that nobody else should either. I have a few bits of ABC on my CD-ROMs that no existing application can process, and the scores and sound files do not always correspond to the ABC I give. This is absolutely intentional. I document what my ABC means, and if the computer can't yet understand what any intelligent human can, that's not my problem. When I'm transcribing a unique source hardly anyone has access to, people who know the value of that source will want to see it reproduced as well as possible. If that means reading ABC source that can't be interpreted by any program, they'll find the effort worthwhile. > If that isn't a strong enough incentive, then it might be a good idea > to create a program which converts ABC tunes to ABC2 tunes, and then > don't even bother including a parser for pre-ABC2 files in new ABC2 > compliant tools. And the burn-the-past attitude of that paragraph is obscene anti- intellectual garbage. You do NOT alter somebody else's past work without their permission or misrepresent your own editing of it as being the real thing. (See the fife music file on my site - I had to edit it to make it work with BarFly, and fixed some apparent transcription errors, but I kept the original in the same file so you can't download my version without getting the unmodified one too). > The added step of doing the conversion every time they want to try > their new tunes out will quickly convince content writers to use > the %%ABC2 tag. And it will make writing new tools easier because > they won't have to deal with any parsing oddities. You're going to "quickly convince" Laurie Griffiths, are you? (And many still-living content creators are untraceable, with no known person formally responsible for maintaining their archives. Guido's suggestion of doing a mass cleanup of old files on the web was phrased the right way, making it a cooperative effort with the original transcriber, but in a *large* proportion of cases there will be no way to find out who that is, or the originator might no longer be in a position to help). Incidentally, not all of the computer industry operates the way you'd like it to. In the aerospace business (at least in the UK), for obvious safety and forensic reasons, all design data must be retained *in its original format* until long after the last aircraft designed with that data has been melted down - no conversion of any kind is permitted, it's up to software to implement complete bit-level compat- ibility with the very earliest file systems and numeric formats. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
