W3C wants to standardise music notation in your Web browser

While not officially part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Music Notation community group formed earlier this year appears to have every chance of finally standardising Western music notation in browsers. Consisting of 222 members as of early December, the group has taken control of two of the most important music notation tools and pushed to get them adopted by Web browsers.

The first one, MusicXML interchange format, has already become a de facto standard in the industry, The Register reports. Created back in 2000, it has since been adopted by "well over 200 applications, including nearly all the major web, desktop, and mobile notation applications," the group's co-chair and MusicXML's author Michael Good wrote in an introductory blog post.

Thirteen years after the first release of MusicXML, Daniel Spreadbury, another co-chair of the group, created the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL). It is essentially an extension of the Unicode standard that includes more Western music notation symbols.

On SMuFL's GitHub page, it's described as a "specification that provides a standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into the Private Use Area in Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane for a single (format-independent) font."

Although both MusicXML and SMuFL have been adopted by a number of major players, the goal of the Music Notation Community Group is to bring the whole industry together to work on the format and font layout in order to create a standard that fits everyone's needs. The group is currently working on a list of use cases, which include the roles of a composer, arranger/orchestrator, performer, publisher, editor, engraver, musicologist, student, and instructor.

While 2015 has been "a year of transition," in 2016 the community plans to develop MusicXML and SMuFL into a Web music standard. A number of community groups have succeeded in making standards that were eventually adopted by W3C, so there's every chance that the music industry will get a universal Web format in the near future.