3 September 2003
I was thinking about SVG, you see. And I was thinking about my quotations from Gamesmanship. And I was thinking `woudn’t it be great if, like, I could have shown the music from the book?’
This doesn’t mean scanning it or taking a photo of it, or even composing it in a specialist program and taking a screenshot. This, to me, means turning it into SVG. Because scores can be expressed as vectors, so I need a vector format.
The first and last step in this process was to markup the music. There are several music-related XML vocabularies, but none seems to come with an XSL stylesheet. There’s one very cool site that does show this, but there isn’t a DTD or Schema for the XML file, and it doesn’t seem that the stylesheet supports much more than you see in the demos.
That’s a shame. As I can’t really read sheet music, I would have had a hard enough time marking it up even with a spec to go on. Without, I don’t know what to do.
My second plan for SVG was Championship Manager related. My Crystal Palace team scored a cracking goal, and I wanted to export it to show off. All I was hoping for was an export to some kind of video format, maybe an animated GIF.
There aren’t any tools that I could find to do this. But if Sports Interactive do fancy making one, here’s an idea: export as XML. All you have to do is record the positions of players on the pitch at certain keyframes, sort of like this:
<player id="16554" team="#1">
<name>
<first>Robbie</first>
<second>Savage</second>
<nick>That Tosser</nick>
</name>
<number>7</number>
<x>128</number>
<x>256</number>
</player>
Then provide a stylesheet to transform that to SVG.
…I’m asking too much, aren’t I?
So here it is, in old-fashioned slideshow format. Not that fancy Flash stuff I played with to show the costumes in Grim Fandango, just the images.
Goal kick to Blackpool.
Smith nods it forward to Routledge.
Routledge finds Freedman in space behind his man. Dougie hits it first time.
Oh dear, that’s not going in…or is it?
OR IS IT!
