[MEI-L] Fwd: pre-release announcement to the Council

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear colleagues,

Just to let you know, a new version of MEI is ready and will be released soon.

Because it is expressed in the "One Document Does-it-all" (ODD) format, this release provides the ability to generate various schemas (RNG and W3C) and accompanying documentation and best practice guidelines.  ODD also allows for the creation of customized schemas and documentation for those with special requirements.  In fact, we have already implemented an MEI customization service as part of this release.  In addition, ODD brings us technically closer to TEI, and together with the TEI Music Special Interest Group we have already enriched TEI with capabilities to include MEI markup. Of course, along the way we've improved the markup capabilities and overall documentation of "out-of-the-box" MEI.

The Technical Team has worked hard to bring this about.  During this time, we faced an increasing interest in MEI from different communities, which led to attendance at several conferences and other dissemination efforts. If you check http://music-encoding.org/community/events, you'll see some of the other activities we've been involved in.  Even though the release took more time than we expected, we hope that you will agree that this is a good thing for MEI.  So, while this release is a few months past our original deadline, we believe that satisfying the professional interest in MEI that has sprung up over the last year is an enviable position in which to find ourselves.

Writing the new Guidelines, we had some very intense discussions, and we believe that, while there is of course always room for improvements, MEI is ready to be released in its current state. In order to avoid further delay and allow more time for review and comment, we decided to release this version without prior review from the Council. We encourage everyone to have a close look at what we offer with this release and provide comments and suggestions that will help us improve MEI.

Due to the improvements we incorporated, this version will break backwards compatibility with the earlier MEI 2010-05 release. This step had to be made at some point, and it seemed better to make this decision sooner than later. All effort has been made to minimize the effect of these changes and we are happy to assist with the relatively easy transition.

For the Technical Team,

Perry Roland and Johannes Kepper