NIFF and SMDL were noble efforts to solve the same type of interchange problem that MusicXML addresses. So why don we use them rather than inventing something new?
NIFF represents music using a graphical format. There is no concept of a “C” in NIFF: instead, you determine pitch by its placement on a staff. This type of graphical music representation has a long and distinguished history. It works well for the scanning programs that were the focus of NIFF’s work. But it works poorly for many other types of applications, such as sequencing and musical databases. For both of these applications, MIDI works much better than NIFF; for notation, though, NIFF is more complete than MIDI. MusicXML is designed to meet the interchange needs for all these types of applications. A graphical format like NIFF really does not work well for general interchange, which is one of the main reasons NIFF has not been adopted by more programs. Another major impediment is that NIFF is a binary format, rather than a text format like XML. It is much easier to write and debug programs that read and write to a text format vs. a binary format. SMDL suffered from the problem of
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