Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Will, I presume you don't currently do extensive documentation of your sources, because I don' t believe Legacy, Geni/Myheritage and FamilySearch do a very good job yet of transferring sources between each other or into GEDCOM. GEDCOM is technically okay for sources, but most programs don't read them in well ...

Arb: Excellent! Now you're really starting to think about this. The examples you give of data-pass through when an intermediate program doesn't handle something are solvable. As I said in my post, the concepts "must be sufficiently independent of each other" to help prevent such problems. What to do about ...

Well yes. A read-only program obviously need not export anything. But if it does, and if it expects other programs following the standard to read its export, then its export must not lose any data. Sorry, but I'm very adamant on this point. This new standard must be rigid and must require data retention ...

Arb: I think data exchange is everything. If you can't export the data your program creates, then it's an island unto itself. So yes, developers need to implement the features they want and they only have to make use of just the data they need, But unless they can't add their contribution to the data stream ...

Arnold, Bart Brenner did trace it down. See Bart's post on Google+ which in summary said: " It was originally in a Family Tree Maker (I'm not sure which version) file which was exported to GEDCOM. That GEDCOM was imported into RootsMagic (probably version 4, perhaps version 3). It is also possible that I ...

Arnold, It was encoded as UTF-8. But that really had nothing to do with it. An end-of-string character is an invalid GEDCOM character and is not allowed in a GEDCOM file. The post links to my Stack Overflow question. The answer I accepted was what I used. The length function gives th correct length of the ...

Yes, you can get infinite loops. It normally isn't a problem for a program like Behold that may expand one level, but otherwise gives everything as links to the other structure. With links, you'll click on one to go to the other. And then, you'll click on the other and go back to the first. But any program ...

Arnold, In the earlier days, GEDCOM's sources weren't as well developed. I happen to have a small booklet called "PAF Documentation Guidelines, 1995 Edition", produced by the Silicon Valley PAF Users Group. They didn't think PAF's ability to document sources was good enough. They went a step further and ...

Enno, I am fine with any simple method as you suggest, but we don't want a standard that is a huge elaborate complicated mess. The point is that GEDCOM may not be the best, but it is able to handle sources despite the statements of many people that it cannot. Louis

Very interesting observations, Enno. I don't share your negativism though. I think it is still early in the life of these APIs and they will evolve, maybe even into something quite different that we might not be able to foresee until it happens. Louis