[MEI-L] Repeats

[Andrew Hankinson]

Hi everyone,

I was just looking at how repeats are defined, and it strikes me as a bit odd.

Currently, it seems as though repeats are encoded by using the `@right` and `@left` attributes on `<measure>`. My biggest concern with this is that it seems to confuse logical and visual functions of repeats; that is, it encodes where a particular symbol is drawn, but doesn't actually encode the semantic existence of a repeat.

I am also trying to figure out the note on `@left` which, essentially, states that you should not use it. I'm not sure how else you would encode a repeat start on a measure without using `@left="rptstart"`. Any insights?

An alternate solution may be to re-work '@left' and '@right' into three new attributes to separate visual from functional. The first `@repeat`, takes values of "start", "end", or "both." Two others, "@startbarline" and "@endbarline" can contain the visual values "dbldotted", "dbldashed", etc. A Schematron rule might be set up to catch the cases where there exists 'repeat="start"' and 'startbarline="dbldotted"' and set a warning or an error. (It may be desirable to have 'repeat="start"' and 'startbarline="invis"', though...)

-Andrew