Co-chair meeting minutes: January 5, 2021

MusicXML 4.0

Pull requests for issues #37 and #23 have been completed and merged, so those issues are now complete. There has been some good discussion on issues #305 and #351 concerning the layout of percussion kits and staves, but Michael plans to park these for the time being in favour of working on some other higher priority items. At the moment, Michael is planning to next tackle issues #307 for polychord notation for chord symbols and #310 for bar numbering for multi-bar rests.

SMuFL 1.4

Daniel made less progress than anticipated over the holiday break on the remaining SMuFL 1.4 issues. As at the time of the last meeting, the single substantive issue remaining concerns numbered notation. Daniel is going to make a final determination over the next week or so whether we have a good enough planned implementation for this important area of notation to move ahead with it in SMuFL 1.4, or to instead defer it for a future release. Other than that, the remaining work is on implementing all of the new ranges in the Bravura font so that the final community report can be delivered.

Daniel anticipates that a beta of both the SMuFL 1.4 specification and accompanying Bravura font should be ready by the end of January.

MNX

Adrian has merged pull requests #205 which adds further beaming examples to the MNX by Example page and #6 which implements conversion of beams in the MNX Converter. There is a pending pull request #213 that adds support for cross-staff beaming, which Adrian will consider before merging.

Adrian’s current focus is on tooling for the MNX specification and associated documentation. Having reviewed a number of available tools for the generation of specifications and documentation (including Bikeshed, Sphinx, Read The Docs, et al), he is proposing the development of a bespoke tool for the creation of the documentation that can best meet the specific needs of documenting a complex XML schema and its elements and attributes.

The proposal is to create a Django-based web application that can be run on a local machine (rather than requiring a centrally-hosted application with its own approach to user identification and authentication, which is in conflict with the IP requirements of the W3C CLA) that can both generate the static pages that will form the public-facing specification and also plain text data files that can fit into the CG’s established workflows using GitHub pull requests to track changes.

Adrian is going to pursue some initial experiments in this direction in the coming weeks. If at all possible the CG will use this new tool not only for the MNX specification but also for the MusicXML 4.0 specification.

Next meeting

The next co-chair meeting will be on Tuesday 19 January 2021.