Gedcom 5.5.5

[B Jansen]

Will Reunion work to comfort with the new GEDCOM standard?

https://www.gedcom.org/gedcom.html

Has anyone looked at this?

[eric.vanbeest]

There are some useful additions in this new, uh, standard, even though it has significant flaws that remain to be resolved. Why they did not do this is baffling; the authors take time out to scold previous standards and drafts, but do not criticise their own failings with the same severity.

It is good that the document clarifies a lot of the grammar problems and sets new defaults appropriately. It is also good that this allows for place names with different alphabets.

But, the most glaring fail for me is: it is still not possible to attach ASSO associated people with an event, such as witnesses to a baptism. This remains boneheadedly reserved for individuals only. They could have done this, and they didn’t.

Other omissions are the inability to cite sources for the location and notes to an event. GEDCOM 5.5 allowed it; this ability is now removed. Why? And hijacking WWW as the all-purpose internet identifier, when the rest of the internet is using URL or URI.

So work left to do for these people...

[B Jansen]

There are some useful additions in this new, uh, standard, even though it has significant flaws that remain to be resolved. Why they did not do this is baffling; the authors take time out to scold previous standards and drafts, but do not criticise their own failings with the same severity.

It is good that the document clarifies a lot of the grammar problems and sets new defaults appropriately. It is also good that this allows for place names with different alphabets.

But, the most glaring fail for me is: it is still not possible to attach ASSO associated people with an event, such as witnesses to a baptism. This remains boneheadedly reserved for individuals only. They could have done this, and they didn’t.

Other omissions are the inability to cite sources for the location and notes to an event. GEDCOM 5.5 allowed it; this ability is now removed. Why? And hijacking WWW as the all-purpose internet identifier, when the rest of the internet is using URL or URI.

So work left to do for these people...

There remain serious shortcomings in the proposed GEDCOM standard, but not the "most glaring" that you perceive: that is a failure of Reunion not the proposed or existing GEDCOM standard--I can attach witnesses, godparents, et al. to a single event in every other genealogy program and have them import and export via GEDCOM. The problem is Reunion's hostility to it.

To the why? I can't speak for them, but my guess would be an attempt to fix the actual problems in the existing GEDCOM standard (not the failings of Reunion you attribute to it) and try to jumpstart the stalled evolution of the standard.