Author: Steven J. Edwards
Date: 14:13:28 06/14/98
When PGN was being developed, there ws great discussion concerning exactly what information should appear in the PGN tag pairs. There was a lot of concern about which tags must appear, which tags should be optional, which tags should be mutually inclusive or exclusive, etc. And there was a lot of discussion about what should appear (and in what format) inside a tag value for each tag name. BUT After looking at many thousands of PGN games over the net, here's a lot of what I see: 1) Event tag values of "?" (or worse, ""). Aw, c'mon, didn't the original data recorder know what the event was? Even "Casual Game" or "Test Game" would be better than nothing. 2) Event tag values with inconsistent, cryptic, or undecipherable abbreviations. Is it so hard to type out "Tournament" or "Championship"? After all, text editors do have global search and replace. 3) Missing or undecipherable Site tag values - same comments as above. 4) Mixing event and site information. 6) Unknown, impossible, or ill-formatted Date tag values. These are annoying, particularly for computer generated or recorded games. Is there anyone out there who doesn't have a clock/calendar chip on their machine? 7) Missing Round numbers, particularly when the round somehow got embedded into the Event or Site tag value where it doesn't belong. 8) Bogus FEN tag values. A FEN record has exactly six fields. Not two. Not eight. And it's not EPD. I can think of more, but you get the idea. Remember, a game is only recorded once but may be copied and read millions of times. So it's worthwhile to put a little effort upfront to make accessing easier for all those who will read the data. -- Steve
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