Then you are not translating that back into HTML tags and then the person will see the HTML and tags and not what was intended to be rendered.

I think that is correct. Notes were never intended in GEDCOM to include markup, and I agree and don’t believe they should. Formatting is not data. Formatting embedded in data wrecks the look of displayed text within its own display if it was not intended for your framework. You are in charge of your program’s display and should be allowed to apply your own formatting.

Louis

But then there’s the other extreme: Programs that allow copying and pasting from a webpage into a note. Those have all the baggage that HTML/CSS/Javascript has. To me, that needs to be kept as a file or image or something external to the note, but linked from the note possibly with a thumbnail image.

And really, the user only decides how to present what is in the Everything Report. You don’t get to decide how to format it. Eventually Behold may do more with formatting, e.g. highlighting relationships or sources or showing differences between merged data with different fonts or color, etc. But anything you want custom formatted is better done in a word processor or html document or spreadsheet, and then linked to from the notes in your data.

That 3rd party software is only manipulating the NOTEs and DATA fields. I think that is reasonable. But formatting sources is going a bit too far. And it’s regarding the formatting of sources where I disagree with Randy Seaver.

The anchor tag has only one function: to mark the beginning and end of a hyperlink, and to point to a defined web address. The rest - for example inline CSS (if used at all, because it defies the purpose of Cascading Style Sheets) - is only used to format the text. What I meant is to simply read out the address of the link and convert it into a RichView link. I thought the user decides how the Everything Report looks like, and not some third-party software which writes formatting information into the GEDCOM file. Or am I missing something? HTML is a markup language to describe a web document; nothing else.

Thanks for thinking about implementing some basic editing feature here. That would really help.

Uwe

I made your edit to your post for you. As far as that goes, when developing this blog and the forum, I went back and forth between allowing editing in the comments and not. The real problem I had was with the editor itself and I wanted consistency between the blog (WordPress) and the forum (bbPress) which had different methods. So I took editing out completely and then forgot about it. I, of course, can edit the posts. But I understand you. I hate forums where you can’t edit at least for 5 minutes to get rid of your typos. That’s one of my biggest complaints about WikiSpaces where BetterGEDCOM is. I’ll take a quick look and see if there is a new plugin or something I might be able to install to allow some editing. … Found Ajax Edit Comments. Looks promising.

Just my 2c, of course…

Uwe

Unfortunately, markup was not even considered in GEDCOM. Including markup in GEDCOM NOTEs does not do anything to break the standard, so many vendors decided to include it because with it they can conveniently store any formatting they allow in their notes. So in this case, they are all still following the GEDCOM standard, but are creating GEDCOMs that some programs (who don’t read and/or interpret the markup the same way) are unable to display similarly.

Markup problems can explode. There are hundreds of tags in HTML. It shouldn’t be the genealogy programmer’s responsibility to have to include a full web browser in their application and interpret JavaScript and CSS and the whole bit. But some markup tags would be useful in a new BetterGEDCOM standard to give limits as to how the programmers should go with this. A limited set would serve the purpose of highlighting what needs to be highlighted. Any more and the user should be advised to create a digital image of their evidence or a copy of the web page that they refer to and link to that from the note, rather than try to reproduce it in the note.

While I think the use of ’strong’ and possibly a couple of others can make Notes look better, the problem as it appears to me is the fault of the Genealogy programs for allowing markup within these fields. It would be better to have section within Notes that have a predefined style, thus, leaving it to the program to display reports, fields etc as already defined.

I would, at this stage, prefer any program that exports to GEDCOM, does NOT include any of their own markup, as the program you may import it to, could have no idea it is markup and display it as pure text.