This file was 00_dancing_standards.txt on the "dancing music" laptop computer.
John C. Nash 2007-3-3
This file is intended to describe the "rules" that I have
used in trying to build a coherent and useful collection of
English and American dance music and instructional notes.
===== General =====
Where possible, I have used plain text files for instructions
and notes. However, "plain text" does differ across operating
systems, though most text editors are smart enough to recognize
the differences. Linux ends lines with a line-feed (LF, ASCII 10)
character. Macintosh uses a carriage-return (CR, ASCII 13), while
Microsoft DOS/Windows uses a two-character pair CR LF (ASCII 13, 10).
The instructional and notes files are not fully commented. I
propose to use tags much as SGML or HTML or XML such as
with corresponding ending tags , ,
.
===== File names =====
Because different operating systems have different requirements
for filenames, I have opted to simplify filenames so that the
collection is portable.
- All spaces have been replaced with underscore (_)
- All quotes, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation, question
brackets, equals, plus, tilda, ampersand etc. have been
removed
,'";:{}[[]]()=+?!~&
& is replaced with _and_ for safety, since & is used
in a number of web-type applications.
- I have not scanned for filename length, but there is a
limit in many operating systems. I would like to suggest
a 100 character limit to filenames.
In giving files names, I have suppressed "A" and "The" at the
beginning, in fact not included them at all. In the names I
have not capitalized 'a' or 'the'.
===== Special files =====
Many dances use lots of different possible music. Linux allows a
"symbolic link" and this allows us to include filenames for the
music easily. The Linux command
ln -s Our_Special_Music.mp3 Our_Funny_Name.music.mp3
will set up a very small file Our_Funny_Name.music.mp3 that simply
points to Our_Special_Music.mp3. There may be many pointers to
this file, so we don't need multiple copies. Note that it is
important to have the .mp3 name at the end of the link to cause
file browsers (I use Gnome browser in Ubuntu) to recognize that
it is supposed to launch the mp3 player of choice.
The .music. part of the name is my convention to tell me I am
dealing with a pointer (symbolic link) rather than an actual file.
I propose to use "Another_Name.link.txt" in the same way for
dances with multiple names e.g., Chestnut is also called
Dove's Figary. The command to do this was
ln -s Chestnut.txt Doves_Figary.link.txt
Note that the ' has been omitted.
In Windows I believe "Shortcuts" will work, but this is still to
be tried out. Similarly, I don't know how Macintosh OS-X deals with
symbolic links.
===== Operating system considerations =====
Linux works with "Permissions" that control who may do what with
files. I have found it important to set the permissions on text
files of dance instructions to 644 mode to ensure double clicking
text files will open a display of the file rather than offering a
dialogue over whether the file is to be "executed". I use 755
permissions for .mp3 files. I also set file ownership to the special
user "dancing" whose password is "music".
More documentation of the setup