On 02-27-2013 12:43, Steve Hayes wrote: > And as soon as the news got around, nobody would touch their program with a > bargepole. And that's the reason we can't get rid of GEDCOM. Most serious genealogists agree that it has serious flaws, but to NOT support it would kill your program. GEDCOM itself, in spite of its flaws, is better than some of its implementations. Especially the ones that want to do something THAT GEDCOM supports, yet choose to do it in a way that not only violates GEDCOM, but is extremely difficult for other programs to handle. Like what $#%&$%^&# Legacy does with PLAC tags, or they way PAF does sources. (Ironic that one of the two worst implementations of GEDCOM I've ever seen comes from the people who invented GEDCOM!) -- Wes Groleau “There are more people worthy of blame than there is blame to go around."

Wes Groleau wrote: > On 02-27-2013 12:43, Steve Hayes wrote: >> And as soon as the news got around, nobody would touch their program with a >> bargepole. > > And that's the reason we can't get rid of GEDCOM. Most serious > genealogists agree that it has serious flaws, but to NOT support it > would kill your program. Not that I disagree, Wes, but you've conflated "genealogists" and the developers/programmers. Most comments in this thread have. Those of the latter who are also the former see things differently than the former who aren't the latter. > GEDCOM itself, in spite of its flaws, is better than some of its > implementations. Again, Amen. > Especially the ones that want to do something THAT GEDCOM supports, yet > choose to do it in a way that not only violates GEDCOM, but is extremely > difficult for other programs to handle. But, generally and as a rule, a GED /from/ YourProgram will reimport /to/ YourProgram without grief. In a free-market system with intellectual property rights, no one ought to expect the vendor of YourProgram to make it easy to abandon YourProgram for HerProgram; and in the 21st century, I can even visualize a developer for NthProgram deliberately penalizing a user for /needing/ to switch to NthProgram (on the 'I-don't-want-a-customer-too-dumb to wait for a program until I perfected this one' grounds). > Like what $#%&$%^&# Legacy does with PLAC tags, or they way PAF does > sources. (Ironic that one of the two worst implementations of GEDCOM > I've ever seen comes from the people who invented GEDCOM!) And why they insist on putting the full name followed by the subdivisions-of-programmer-choice iks me when I have to twiddle one. As for worst implementation, can I vote for FTW's use of Ged5.0? Drove me to sobriety one summer, it did. ;) Cheryl