Having been a committee member for the design and implementation of the EDI
standards in Europe, in the mid 1980-1990s,  I am well aware of the issues
of getting a standard format. We ended up with a lot of optional records
that most people ignored or did not need, and equally with the issue of a
business decided that he did want them and insisted that you provide them.

 

Hopefully, we will get to a basic structure which everyone will support and
with only a few, if any, non-mandatory fields.

 

Regards

 

Chris 

 

From: LegacyUserGroup [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Michael Feldman
Sent: 10 July 2017 20:22
To: Legacy User Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Problem with V8.0.0.602 and V8.0.0.604

 

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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