Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Enno, Well its not really like versioning. The previous version of the data needs to be passed ONLY when (1) the program does not support the feature in question, and (2) the data it subordinate to (i.e. dependent on) other data that the user has changed. So there would never be two versions of any data. ...

Enno, I agree with you. When a data item is edited, the attached non-handled data may not be relevant or may even be wrong. But that doesn't mean the issue is unsolvable. One possible solution might be to require that the former pre-edited data be transmitted with the non-handled data as a separate event ...

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 ...