On 25 Jan 2002 in soc.genealogy.misc, lsilvand wrote: > I've been looking at different genealogy programs, but I'm not sure > which to choose. Is there a universal standard (like ASCII or HTML) > that I should be sure the program is able to read and write in (for > sharing data with other genealogy interested people)? Pretty much any genealogy program will read/write GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication), a text-format data file used to transfer information between programs. Read some of the debates in news:soc.genealogy.computing for thoughts on how well it does/doesn't work. Most programs have some capacity for outputting html pages from your dataset. Some provide hosting; with the others, it's up to you. There are also a number of utilities which will take a GEDCOM file as input and output a website. > Are there any light freeware programs that anyone could recommend? Two free programs, both full-featured and quite usable, are Legacy http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/ and Personal Ancestral File (PAF) http://familysearch.org/ -- Joe Makowiec can be reached at: makowiec(at)nycap(dot)rr(dot)com