Re: [LegacyUG] Problem with V8.0.0.602 and V8.0.0.604

[Michael Feldman]

Hi all, Chris Hill wrote: [snip]   The Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO) was started in 2012 and has just released its very first draft standards for public comment, at the end of June. Something that I need to review. Hopefully, if we can get everyone supporting a single standard, with no exceptions, we will then be able to transfer data with no loss. A worthy ideal overall, but "no exceptions" is unlikely to happen in practice. The computing world is filled with technical standards of one kind or another; anyone who works in, or near, a standards committee know this is like herding cats. And even after a standard is adopted, some cats will wander off in their own direction anyway (which is why standards are always revised periodically, to bring exceptions into the fold, then the process starts again). It's human nature (and, often, business nature as well). [ASIDE] The evolution of character-set standards is a good example. I think the discussion here of the em-dash problems is a manifestation of this. "Back in the day" (the fifties), a character was represented as six bits. Of course this limited the total number of characters to 64, which is why the early computers printed everything as UPPER CASE -- no room for lower case in the character set. In recent decades, we've gone to 7 bits, 8 bits, and beyond, to try to accommodate all countries' alphabets and now, even, emojis. Google "number of bits in an emoji" for character-set fun and games. [back to GEDCOM] It'll be interesting to see what FHISO comes up with... Just my $0.02.:-) Mike Feldman

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