Author: Peter Klausler
Date: 22:18:04 05/30/98
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A comment on, well, commentary in PGN games. A deficiency
with the present Standard is that commentary in movetext
applies to both the positions reached as well as to the
context of the game. It's not presently possible to
distinguish between comments that apply to positions
independent of whatever game in which they arise
(such as evaluative scores, principal variations,
etc.) and those comments that belong only with that
one game (time trouble, previous moves by the player
in that position, tournament hall catching fire, etc.)
In CDB, in order to not lose information, I have assumed
that all comments pertain to positions. This has the
unfortunate effect of replicating game commentary
inappropriately when exporting other games containing
the same positions.
I very much like the idea of permitting EPD descriptive
annotations in a standardized form to appear in the movetext.
I would like to suggest that the new <> notation be
intended to apply to positions, while the old {} notation
be used for comments that are contextual with the one
game, including comments on the moves.
Unfortunately, all comments today are in the {} notation,
and it seems to me that they usually apply to positions
instead of to games. So I should modify my suggestion
to be this:
< standardized positional annotations >
<< game-specific commentary, probably not standardizable >>
{ arbitrary comments }
The NAGs presently use a single syntax to convey both
positional and game information, but I don't think that
there is ambiguity since their meanings are pretty clear.
A related issue that I have had to deal with involves the
appearance of commentary prior to movetext, in games as well
as at the heads of variations. I've handled such comments
in special ways, and perhaps their semantics should be
clarified.
Agree that PGN discussions need to be kept here in this
forum.
-Peter Klausler
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