Why is MusicXML so verbose? Isn that inefficient?
MusicXML is both an interchange and distribution format. In both cases, ease of comprehension is much more important than terseness. Musical representation is complex enough without trying to figure out an abbreviated code. The XML specification advises that “terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance”, and we believe this is really true. Somebody who understands the domain should be able to figure out the basics of an XML file simply by reading it. We believe that MusicXML meets this goal, where several other musical XML proposals do not. There is of course a place for terse text formats like abc or Plaine and Easie, which allow easy and fast text entry of musical data. There are converters for both abc and the Plaine and Easie codes to MusicXML. Uncompressed MusicXML files do take up a lot of space, which can be problematic for digital sheet music distribution. MusicXML 2.0 adds a compressed zip format with a .
