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Subject: Re: Ten years later: revising EPD/FEN/PGN

Author: Andreas Stabel

Date: 01:52:23 09/10/03

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A few points:

1) I think any revision has to be as much as possible backwards compatible.
2) En passant square in FEN should perhaps only be set if there is a legal
   en passant capture for the opponent.
3) The SAN should perhaps allow disambiguation when two pseudolegal moves are
   ambiguous, so programs generating SAN does not have to have a full chess
   engine to generate legal SAN. This point of course is the opposite of the
   previous point to require a check that an en passant move should be legal
   before setting the EP square in FEN. My suggestion is either not 2), but 3)
   or 2), but not 3).

Generally there are a lot of variations/extentions of PGN.
Some of these try to include information not covered by the current
standard. There are two ways to deal with this.

The first is to make a new standard that includes everything. The advantage
is that all current PGN files will be valid in the new standard, and the
disadvantage is that there will be a big and messy definition which will be
very difficult to implement.

The second is to make a new and perhaps even stricter definition than today.
This strict definition could contain various extentions needed to include new
information, but will not allow a lot of different ways of representing the
information in PGN.

My general thought about revising these standards is that it is too late to do
this. There are too many programs using the current standard and variations of
this. In fact - it seems that it is not so difficult to make a program accept
most of these variations, so I'm not sure there is a need for an update. People
seem to live happily with todays standard and its variations.

My general wish is that if the standard is revised (and people really implement
the new standard), the new standard should be as strict, clear and simple as
possible.

Now see if all this is possible to include in a simple standard :)

Best regards and thanks for the effort
Andreas Stabel



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