On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 10:20:03AM +0000, Tom Novelli wrote: > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Jack Campin wrote: > > > >> I've been working on an Abc 2.0 proposal, which is a stripped-down > > >> version of 1.6. Amongst other things, I removed most of the headers > > >> (notably A-G, X and Z, to avoid confusion with notes and rests). > > > In my view of things, removing the C:Composer field steps just over > > > the line in being too radical :0( I really like to see this header > > > just under the title, where it doesn't get lost. > > > > Most of those are too widely used to be thrown away, though some > > are too vaguely specified to be given a reliable semantics. > > Vagueness is a good reason to throw them away. It would have to be 2.0 > and not 1.8, since it breaks compatibility. All the older Abc files would > still work, more or less, just like they do today, but the stricter 2.0 > format would work a lot more reliably. N:notes/narrative, I:indexing > info, and % comments would suffice for anything not essential to rendering > sheet music. And anything non-standard belongs in a comment.
But, as has been said before, ABC is used for a lot more than just rendering sheet music. One advantage it has, to me, over just about everything else I've looked at is the way it offers a usable way of storing _lots_ of tunes, rather than just concentrating on how to do one tune. Which depends on being able to note what country it comes from, what "sort" of tune it is, etc etc. People may have used the O: R:, etc etc, fields in "non-standard" ways, but if we drop them, all of this will become non-standard, and people will be forced to invent their own ways of representing this. So there'll be even less clarity than now, and ABC collections will become less readable, to anyone except the author, than they are now. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
