Denis Beauregard wrote: > Hi: > > I think what is wrong with GEDCOM as a standard is not the GEDCOM > itself. Its structure is quite easy to understand and it is easy > to write a software that will both understand it and generate it. > > I would say the problem, as Bob said, is when the standard is > applied. Any software maker has his/her opinion about that, but > also, and this is more important, very few softwares can indeed > support all the features in GEDCOM and many may have more features. [SNIP] This kind of things has always plagued the software industry, alas. ANSI or ISO or W3C publishes a standard for some document format or language specification, and before you know it, there are half a dozen implementations from different vendors who all add "enhancements" that are incompatible with the standard and with one another. Look at the way Fortran developed after the 1966 and 1977 ANSI standards, for example. Big companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation released compilers which allowed all manner of non-standard extensions, which made portability a huge headache. More recently, Microsoft has gained a dubious reputation for its "embrace and extend" tactic. Ask any web designer about the "standard" for JavaScript in web browsers, and watch them roll their eyes and groan. I work in bioinformatics, using and writing software to analyse, store and interchange biological information about DNA. There are half a dozen different "standard" ways to store some kinds of data, and a lot of software is pretty lax about obeying the standard when writing data files. Like Andrew Tanenbaum said, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from :-) David Harper Cambridge, England