Lemonade Love and Hope

[cbullard@HiWAAY.net (Len Bullard)]

YO!  LoLife!  Thanks for the tale from the
upper reaches of the music kingdom!!

How often do we get that kind of inside view?

I suppose that in some ways, Prince must'ave
been fairly honest in "purple rain" as the
character you present resembles the character
from the movie... say, just a bit self-centered.

Ah well, the ways of genius.  I guess its
Ok as long as his checks don't bounce.

BTW: Stu:  I wasn't tryin' to put you "in your
place".  REALLY.  I just do SGML consulting
for a living and work on HyTime.  HTML is
"like country" compared to SGML "like jazz".
I've sat through so many debates on it now,
and had to present to so many committees
and conferences on the subject, I'm something
of a "KneeJerk" on the subject.  ;-)

HyTime was actually created for the
Standard Music Description Language. 
SMDL still is in progress and will be
used for musical databases.

HyTime (ISO 10744) is the link, location, and
synchronization part of SMDL.  It 
was intended to be a format that would
enable the multimedia content to be
transferable among hard media (e.g. CDs).
This is a silent deadly issue for those
artists running to do hypermedia because
much of the money is made every time
a new media type appears and the old
content has to be transferred.  Guys like
Saul Zaentz got fairly wealthy buying up
old labels and reissuing the tracks.
That was easy for audio.  Without some
better standards (and no, the Internet
standards WON'T do the job, but that
is a fight for a different list), Kate could
put herself in a corner when she begins
to venture into the area.  It's called "The
Lobster Trap":  the lobster goes in but
can't get out.  So where I would like to
see her do it, some care is required. 
She could do some really good work, but no one
can guarantee right now that the work
would outlast the system player.  Think
of it as having to buy mixing deck she
used just to listen to the tracks.

The technology and the standards are
not quite there.  But they are breathing hard...

len