(Part two)
GEDCOM is nothing more than a signpost for data portability. It's something we should all be concerned with. GEDCOM is the de facto medium of exchange of genealogical data. That's a sad state, because
1) it's out of date
2) it's not as focused on evidence as it should be
3) it's inadequate to capture a lot of information important to family historians and genealogists
4) as old and inadequate as it is, it's still not fully implemented by any program, especially FTM
Data portability, I repeat, should be important to all users. Software companies come and go. File formats come and go. Should this mean that you have to re-enter your data every time that you change software programs?
Well, if you don't care about data portability, then you're a fool. Why would you want to spend countless hours entering data into a program that cannot every be extracted from that program? That's the case today with FTM. Too much of what you put in there is stuck there.
We all ought to be sensitive, therefore, to this subject. It should be the concern of every user that his or her time invested in putting data into this software program won't be lost because he changed programs or because FTM is no longer available.
The web links feature is case and point. If you put the time into typing the URLs into the field that FTM now encourages you to use, then you should be prepared to lose that information, because it cannot be exported. (Meanwhile, if you put it into a different field, it will be preserved on export. How silly is that?)
You might be willing to bet on how long FTM and Ancestry.com will be around. I'm not. This is my research. I intend to own it, and I don't intend to repeat it. When I use features of FTM that don't export, I lose it. (Think 20,000 people and the need to re-enter each fact or detail that doesn't carry over to the next software.)
Lack of GEDCOM compatibility ought to be a clarion call to *every* user in the community. Even if this doesn't affect you now, KathyMarieAnn, it will affect you in the future. So, you might not care about this specific information being exported to GEDCOM, but you should be concerned in general that all data are exported to GEDCOM. We all should. Whatever we put in, we should want out.
(More later.)
GEDCOM is nothing more than a signpost for data portability. It's something we should all be concerned with. GEDCOM is the de facto medium of exchange of genealogical data. That's a sad state, because
1) it's out of date
2) it's not as focused on evidence as it should be
3) it's inadequate to capture a lot of information important to family historians and genealogists
4) as old and inadequate as it is, it's still not fully implemented by any program, especially FTM
Data portability, I repeat, should be important to all users. Software companies come and go. File formats come and go. Should this mean that you have to re-enter your data every time that you change software programs?
Well, if you don't care about data portability, then you're a fool. Why would you want to spend countless hours entering data into a program that cannot every be extracted from that program? That's the case today with FTM. Too much of what you put in there is stuck there.
We all ought to be sensitive, therefore, to this subject. It should be the concern of every user that his or her time invested in putting data into this software program won't be lost because he changed programs or because FTM is no longer available.
The web links feature is case and point. If you put the time into typing the URLs into the field that FTM now encourages you to use, then you should be prepared to lose that information, because it cannot be exported. (Meanwhile, if you put it into a different field, it will be preserved on export. How silly is that?)
You might be willing to bet on how long FTM and Ancestry.com will be around. I'm not. This is my research. I intend to own it, and I don't intend to repeat it. When I use features of FTM that don't export, I lose it. (Think 20,000 people and the need to re-enter each fact or detail that doesn't carry over to the next software.)
Lack of GEDCOM compatibility ought to be a clarion call to *every* user in the community. Even if this doesn't affect you now, KathyMarieAnn, it will affect you in the future. So, you might not care about this specific information being exported to GEDCOM, but you should be concerned in general that all data are exported to GEDCOM. We all should. Whatever we put in, we should want out.
(More later.)