My apologies to those who are bored by GEDCOM but its existence is fundamental to our ability to transfer data other than in human-only readable form. It concerns me that genealogical and family history societies are letting software people make the running on whether or not GEDCOM is replaced / enhanced / left to die. For what it's worth as a former IT professional of 30y standing writing and supporting software: Caroline said "when software developers blame the exporting program they abdicate their own responsibility to their customers". I certainly applaud those who tweak their software and hope they'll gain the market share they deserve. But we need to distinguish between the general responsibility to their customers of providing the optimum software and the responsibility to produce GEDCOM that is compliant to a standard. This responsibility exists and lies with the person who writes the export code. There are 2 reasons for this - if they call it a GEDCOM export, it should be that, not a half-hearted attempt. Secondly, if there are (say) 20 popular programs out there, and you write a 21st, you seriously do not want to be writing 20 different import routines plus your own export - one export and one import ought to suffice. Sue said "Identifying "incorrect" GEDCOM is difficult because the specification is not entirely clear." I'd disagree. For the most part, the GEDCOM standard is perfectly clear and it annoys me that so many sling around the view that GEDCOM is flawed. (I suspect Sue, from her phrasing, doesn't belong to the extreme mud-slingers, though). Certainly, the casual reader will not find it at all clear - but that's not the target audience. In the BetterGEDCOM Wiki, it proved hard for any of the IT literate contributors to find an "error" in the specification - about the only one that sticks in my mind is that one could have an infinite loop of a Source referring to a standalone Note, which is justified by the first Source, which would refer to the same standalone Note, which is... This is NOT to say that GEDCOM is adequate for family history today. It isn't. The point is that all the new standards in the world won't help if the major problem is not with GEDCOM but with the fact that developers either can't be bothered to read the standard properly or can't be bothered to take all the steps necessary to reformat their own data to fit into the GEDCOM model. Neither of those problems will be fixed by a new or enhanced standard. In essence we need a 2-pronged approach - firstly we need to highlight the incompetencies of software suppliers who can't be bothered to understand the difference between CONT and CONC in a GEDCOM file. Secondly we need to agree on what family historians want from a revision / replacement of GEDCOM. (If we want anything). For instance, US genealogists tend to emphasise the data that goes into citations - are UK family historians satisfied with what they have in GEDCOM? Alternatively are we happy that FamilySearch will drive GEDCOMX (say) and only produce something to satisfy FS's needs? Adrian Bruce

> From: Adrian Bruce > Sent: 24 April 2012 12:01 > > Sue said "Identifying "incorrect" GEDCOM is difficult because the > specification is not entirely clear." I'd disagree. For the most > part, the GEDCOM standard is perfectly clear and it annoys me that > so many sling around the view that GEDCOM is flawed. <snip> > In the BetterGEDCOM Wiki, it proved hard for any of the IT literate > contributors to find an "error" in the specification Let me point out one ambiguity that caught me when I wrote a report to generate GEDCOM from my own relational database for importing into genealogy software - the genealogically fundamental point of how to indicate a surname. The specification for representing personal name is given here: http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pmcbride/gedcom/55gcch2.htm#NAME_PERSONAL The formal declaration in the square brackets, as explained by the text and the examples, shows that the surname is marked with slashes, and this is clear. The formal declaration for cases where the surname is preceded (or followed) by another part of the name, has a space before (or after) the slash, and so do the examples given just below, e.g., William Lee /Parry/. The descriptive text does not mention the space as a requirement. Elsewhere in the specification examples are given without the space, e.g., Fred/Jones/ is used at http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pmcbride/gedcom/55gcch2.htm#INDIVIDUAL_RECORD So the space is in the formal definition but not in the description and is in some of the examples but not others. In addition the formal definition shows a trailing space after the final element of the name in the first four forms of name (with one or two elements), but this is not clear in the last form with three elements. It looks as though the spaces here are for clarity and are not required, but I can't find a statement about whether spaces are meaningful in the definition of the lineage linked grammar (chapter 2 of the specification). To me it is ambiguous whether and where spaces are required in a personal name, and possibly elsewhere. My software required the spaces to identify a surname on import but my initial attempt at producing a GEDCOM did not use them. Ambiguity? Definitely! Andrew -- Andrew Millard - [email protected] Bodimeade genealogy:   http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/Bodimeade/ My family history:     http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/ GenUKI Middx + London: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/genuki/MDX/ + ../LND/