There is a lot to be said about standards, but common sense should prevail. Very few things have remained the same in computers, such as the program language you use. I've programmed for years and C is not the same as it was when I started and will not compile on the original compilers. Is that a bad thing? Heck no! I much prefer the advancements over slavish devotion to remain compatible at all costs.
On the other hand I don't think standards should be broken at the drop of a hat. Microsoft breaks standards on purpose as a matter of course just to remain incompatible and to distinguish themselves and discourage people from moving to superior operating system. GTP pretty much replace GMP. A lot of resistance because GMP was the defacto standard at the time. It would have been foolish to insist on being backwards compatible. I think this is a good move. Make your software read both formats seamlessly, and make it write either format optionally. Provide conversion utilities that convert in both directions. It's a relatively painless improvement to SGF. - Don Jeff Nowakowski wrote: > On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 01:16 -0700, Phil G wrote: > >> As a community, I believe we can improve SGF by extending the >> specification slightly to allow points to also be encoded in >> "standard" coordinates and depreciated, admittedly slowly, the use of >> the old coordinate system. We already see Go programs (SmartGo, GoGui >> and others) supporting this format. Maybe this can be a key point in >> the proposed FF[5] specification. >> > > As a community, I don't think we should support *breaking* an existing, > well-established data format over something as trivial as the coordinate > system used. There are much bigger issues with sgf, such as not being > able to follow a teaching review that jumps around nodes. > > What I would support is a new standard that was backwards compatible > with existing tools. > > -Jeff > > > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
