Hi all, To me, the great advantage of the GEDCOM format is that every program can (or should) read and export it. Although the format may have long passed its use-by date, it still remains the lingua franca.
I would much rather initially receive a plain vanilla, *valid* GEDCOM from a newly found umpteenth cousin than a file in some weird and wonderful proprietary format. Bells and whistles are all very nice, but the conversion effort required is often painful. Ron writes "if there is any compilation of what extras you'd like GEDCOM to include, tell me." OK: my wish would be for validate() to perform a very picky and fussy "lint". As the docs say of validate(), "this performs a number of consistency checks, but could do even more". The best GEDCOM validator I know of is Tim Forsythe's VGed 3.02 (see http://ancestorsnow.blogspot.com/2011/07/vged.html). - Mike
