Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Uwe: I've looked at a few possibilities to parse the HTML But it's not just a matter of eliminating the markup. The 6 markup items I've specified above probably could and should be displayed, especially the hyperlinks which actually contain data about the link embedded into the markup.

Unfortunately Brett, many of the top programs do export markup, including RootsMagic, Legacy and Paf. And that's what currently happens in Behold: the markup is displayed as pure text. So I will have to do something about it eventually.

I'm with you and Version 1 is what I'm working on. This is now in my future plans for Version 2.1. But I just can't stop thinking. :-)

Russ, I think that the work you are doing is excellent. Without placing blame on which program might be wrong, the bottom line is that the two programs simply did not interpret and implement the standard the same way. In my opinion, your tests are great because they are showing the areas where data ...

Thanks Randy. I've now been doing some research into the early beginnings and thoughts and concepts that Bill Harten and his team had about GEDCOM. My respect for their work grows with every tidbit of history that I uncover. Redoing GEDCOM is not a simple task that two dozen people can accomplish in their ...

Yes Gene, and even in your comment, you're still blaming the delivery boy ("rely on GEDCOM"), when the real culprits are the exporting program and the importing program. I don't blame you for this. It is the natural thing to do. What you and all users should have done for years is complain. Complain ...

Thanks Brett. It should have been www.beholdgenealogy.com/future.php. It's now fixed.

Thanks for posting a comment to my blog, Greg. I give you a lot of credit for pulling this BetterGEDCOM endeavor along. I get encouraged by progress, and the recent page added on Formulation of the BetterGEDCOM Data Model is a big step in the right direction. The "Research Model" is a theoretically nice ...

I don't see any real benefits personally in a new standard. I am actually quite happy having Behold read in all the flavors of GEDCOM as now exist. If a new standard came about, then I'd support it as well. I haven't added Behold's export yet. But there's no use exporting anything but GEDCOM if that's all other ...

Uwe: It's not just a matter of converting GEDCOM to XML. For years, there are many that have said that GEDCOM needs to be improved. This is their chance to do that. The real challenge will be to give the 200 or so authors of genealogy programs a good reason to adopt the new standard and implement it.