Lilypond's SVG output

[Sandor Spruit]

Hello,

I recently had an informal discussion with some collegues on the use of SVG, in
general. They are in music research, I am a developer working on a completely
unrelated topic - so please forgive me my ignorance w.r.t. music-related
terminology.

We discussed the possibilities to use music scores on web pages, and they
immediately referred to Lilypond because of its quality output. While browsing
this list's archives, and other on-line discussions for that matter, two
questions came up:

- In what version, exactly, did Lilypond drop the use of groups (svg:g) in its
output?

I read a debate on this issue, where the key argument against groups was the
trouble people have in editing grouped SVG elements in Inkscape. I can, however,
imagine all sorts of situations in which group elements could be very useful -
from a developer's point of view at least. This leads to the second question:

- For what purpose are people putting music up on the web; what's the typical
use case?

Just publishing it for others to read? Hyperlinking to it, from it? Annotations?
Keeping bits and pieces of music for later reference? Learning? Studying?
Comparing versions?

I may, at some point, be in the position to do some work on this. But I'm
hesitant to dive in at the deep end - meaning Lilypond tens of thousands of
lines of code ...

A bit of guidance might help though
cheers,

Sandor Spruit
Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University