[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Choosing a target name for a processing instruction
Thanks for all the great feedback! We always encourage MusicXML developers to use validating parsers. Music notation is complicated, so MusicXML has grown quite large to accommodate everything that is needed for industrial-quality interchange of documents between programs. Validation has been a huge help in making document interchange work better for our audience of composers, arrangers, engravers, publishers, and other musicians. MusicXML has had its success in large part by being developer-friendly. For instance, when we updated to MusicXML 1.1, we made sure that all valid MusicXML 1.0 documents are also valid MusicXML 1.1 documents. There's no way we can have the flagship MusicXML writer produce invalid documents. Fortunately, SOAP's limitations aren't an issue for MusicXML applications. We have just two applications that really need this added functionality ASAP - our writing application and a third-party reading application. It turns out that writing a processing instruction without a data field is problematic with our Java/Xerces combination, so instead of using <?feature?> we are now using <?treat-like feature?> This indicates that the following element would really be treated as another element if only that element had a little more extensibility to it. This provides the extra generalization that Peter suggested, without requiring any parsing overhead beyond doing two exact matches instead of one. Elliotte, you're right that any application that reads this processing instruction won't be able to get rid of the PI-reading code. Fortunately that may just be one application, though anybody else will be free to join in. But we should be able to get rid of the PI-writing code when MusicXML 1.2 comes out. MusicXML is developed via an informal community process, so we can't just release a patch version as quickly as we need for this feature. As long as the reading application's parser can handle a simple processing instruction, we should be OK. Rick, we've already discussed this with the developers that needs this feature now, and we'll be discussing this on our MusicXML list with the major MusicXML implementers later today. I wanted the broader advice of the XML developer community to help develop the initial proposal. It has been very helpful. Thanks again! Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com
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