Talk:Portable Game Notation

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With respect to the person with IP Address: 213.78.76.88

"Why the XML evangalism in a PGN context"

It is very sad that people like this fail to see the truth of the matter or are even not bothered to find out what XML is before deleting a very valid point that PGN is an increasingly backward ,primitive, and non-extensible tagging of a chess game. There are already various XML implementations for chess if the person had been at all bothered to find out or investigate this area.

Cax XML :- http://www.chesscity.com/RESOURCES/chess_tech.htm Checkmate XML: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/08/25/tourist.html Simple XML for chess: http://chess.arska.org/sxc/ XML Definitions for chess: http://palamede.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$47 Chess viewer making use of XML: http://www.renderx.com/chess.html PGN XML viewer: http://www.cybercom.net/~zbrad/Chess/pgnxml/ Chess and XML: http://geekswithblogs.net/ansari/archive/2004/08/28/10328.aspx

This is an article on PGN, not XML. --Malathion 13:40, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And that's not to say there may be advantages to XML; actually, the only practical one I can come up with is that it's inherently extensible while PGN isn't. But XML is, all too often, the hammer looking for yet another nail to bend all out of shape.

PGN is trivial to parse, generate and manipulate, easily human-readable and human-writable, and has served its specific purpose very well for many years. XML is none of these things, and simply recreating the equivalent of PGN with XML does nothing except add unnecessary complexity. Might as well add an ASN.1 wrapper.

To quote from one of the articles listed above:

The numbered items, on the other hand, verge on the inscrutable.

Anyone who has ever studied chess should giggle gleefully at this! The author is, of course, referring to the notation format used to describe chess games for at least the last 100 years. (We've switched from descriptive to algebraic notation during that time, but the basic format has remained the same.)

In short: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. PGN isn't perfect, but it does its job very well for at least 99% of what it's used for. And if you are going to fix it, make sure you understand the problem first! Anyone who writes nonsense like the above quote is purposefully ignoring a lot of history in the name of "progress".--12.103.251.203 15:41, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Example

The example shown should include all the different types of things in a PGN that are possible: Queen-side castling, promotions, two knights able to move to the same spot, annotations, etc. I understand that it should be a notable game (such as that of Fischer and Spassky), but we should find another one, so that people can actually see how it all fits together. 70.111.219.18 12:39, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Please add clarification on stalemate

I found just like the example that stalemates are noted by adding the 1/2-1/2 notation at the game end, but it would be helpful to note there is no notation for stalemate in the text. Ryan