[MEI-L] MEI version 3.0.0...; Guidelines or reference manual?

[Byrd, Donald A.]

Congratulations to all involved! This is another milestone for MEI.

This seems like as good a time as any to bring up something that's been bothering me for a long time. The MEI 3.0.0 Guidelines document is ca. 1,669 pages. After leafing through it for a little while, I estimate that approximately one percent of it could reasonably be described as guidelines; the rest is clearly a reference manual. Almost 1400 pages constitute the Data Dictionary, and even the other 300 pages appear to be overwhelmingly reference. So why is it called "Guidelines"? A couple of years back, I spent some time looking around for an MEI reference manual before I realized that the "Guidelines" are it!

Perry once explained to me how this misleading name came to be; I forget what he said, but I can't imagine there's a good reason not to call it something like "Reference Manual and Guidelines".

--Don


On Jun 20, 2016, at 5:09 PM, "Roland, Perry D. (pdr4h)" <pdr4h at eservices.virginia.edu> wrote:

> 
> ** Please circulate widely and forgive any cross-posting.  **
> 
> The MEI Board is happy to announce the release of version 3.0.0 of the MEI specification and documentary guidelines. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an international collaborative effort to capture the semantics of music notation documents as machine-readable data.  Participants in MEI include libraries, universities, companies, and individual researchers from around the world.  For more information about MEI, please visit www.music-encoding.org.
> 
> Highlights of this release include:
> 
> * association of MEI elements with external code lists, such as Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL);
> * expanded metadata capabilities, such as the inclusion of non-MEI metadata formats;
> * improved representation of typographic details;
> * description of MEI components using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG); and
> * revision of the MEI Guidelines and Data Dictionary (formerly known as the "Tag Library").
> 
> To see all of the changes made for this revision, please visit the main Music Encoding Initiative Git repository [1], the Encoding Tools repository [2], and the Sample Encodings repository [3].
> 
> The source files, schemata, and guidelines for this release are available from the main Music Encoding Initiative Git repository [4].  Browse-able [5] and printable [6] versions of the Guidelines and Data Dictionary are available from the MEI web site, as are plain text versions of the RNG schemata [7].
> 
> The mei21to30 XSLT style sheet, available from the Encoding Tools repository, may be used to convert MEI instances from the previous version (2.1.1, aka MEI2013) to version 3.0.0.
> 
> Many thanks to everyone who participated in the revision process. Without a great deal of teamwork, an undertaking of this magnitude would not be possible. Of course, any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the editors.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/music-encoding/music-encoding
> [2] https://github.com/music-encoding/encoding-tools/releases/tag/v3.0.0
> [3] https://github.com/music-encoding/sample-encodings/releases/tag/v3.0.0
> [4] https://github.com/music-encoding/music-encoding/releases/tag/v3.0.0
> [5] http://music-encoding.org/support/guidelines/
> [6] http://www.music-encoding.org/docs/MEI_Guidelines_v3.0.0.pdf
> [7] http://www.music-encoding.org/schema/current/ 
> 
> --
> p.
> 
> __________________________
> Perry Roland
> Music Library
> University of Virginia
> P. O. Box 400175
> Charlottesville, VA 22904
> 434-982-2702 (w)
> pdr4h (at) virginia (dot) edu
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---
Donald Byrd
Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow
Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics
Visiting Scientist, Research Technologies
Indiana University Bloomington