Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:19:37 09/10/01
The PGN standard seems to be owned by Steven J. Edwards. The standard is
extremely important, and he hasn't made any changes to it for the past several
years, so there is now an attempt to declare him unimportant and change the
spec.
A post detailing these changes was submitted to r.g.c.c. a few days ago. The
changes are being authored by:
Alan Cowderoy (Palamede), Ben Bulsink (DGT Projects), Andrew
Templeton(Palamede/Palview), Eric Bentzen (Enpassant.dk, Palamede), Mathias
Feist
(Chessbase), Victor Zakharov (Chess Assistant).
I know who some of these people are, but not all of them. DGT makes chess
boards, CA and CB are well-known, and Palamede looks like it's just a chess
website.
There are many topics for discussion here:
1) Is Steven J. Edwards out, and if so, is this how ownership of the standard is
supposed to be passed?
2) Is this a fait-accompli since Chessbase and Chess Assistant have apparently
signed on to this?
3) Does anyone have anything to say about the changes proposed? Are they good
changes?
I don't know who started this effort, but the main point seems to be to design a
way that the time on the clock after each move can be recorded in PGN. There is
no sensible way to do this now, so they use pseudo-comments to do this.
A possible problem is that they are overloading their clock-time tag already.
It is both a command to the viewer, which presumably could be displayed however
the viewer wants to display it, and as an embedded argument (I can't think of
another way to say this) to a normal comment. Meaning that we have this:
{[%clk 1:03:23]}
and this:
{White is in time pressure since he only has [%clk 0:00:22] left.}
The first is just a directive to the viewer, the second is essentially telling
the viewer to embed the time in a comment and display it.
This makes me uneasy, because in this case, I think that the all that is
probably needed is the directive form. There are other cases where these
pseudo-comments should end up being embedded in textual comments, so perhaps I
am being worried for no reason, but I'm still concerned that there could be a
rush to change the spec so that DGT and CB/CA can solve a technical problem, and
everyone else could pay for this due to a broken or poorly designed set of PGN
extensions.
Is this the way the PGN standard should go?
bruce
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