Lee,
I think you're being a bit unfair holding vendors in this market place to a standard that doesn't exist elsewhere. Microsoft Word doesn't fully translate to Word Perfect. Power Point doesn't fully translate to Keynote. AutoCAD doesn't fully translate to its slew of alternatives. Yada yada yada. There is no utopia where competitors work together to ensure that customers are portable. At best these companies devote time and money to helping customers make the leap from someone else's proprietary system to their own.
You can use genealogy software and still keep your data portable. You just have to restrict your use of the software to those aspects that export to GEDCOM and will be successfully imported elsewhere. Family Tree Maker is a good choice for that in my opinion because its features often fall short of, rather than exceed, the GEDCOM standard. Still, it's up to you to identify the LCD among available software and stick with it.
All this presumes, of course, that your genealogy hobby would benefit from software. I'm not sure that's the case. If you don't know that the National Archives and Records Administration is the government entity that films and stores the census, then you're probably not too deep into this hobby. (NARA roll numbers [or their FHL counterparts] ought to be part of any source citation from a U.S. Census record.) This positions you well to avoid the pitfalls that come with the lack of data portability, should your hobby rise to the level of benefitting from software.
Some of your observations about GEDCOM are a bit off in my opinion. Although it has not been updated since 1999, it is the de facto standard, and it's not likely to be replaced anytime soon.
GEDCOM X is not a one man show. It was proposed by FamilySearch (the people who did the original GEDCOM) in Feb of this year. It may not become the new standard, but it has a lot of inertia by virtue of its past, and some of the proposals already aim to fix what ails previous editions of GEDCOM, meaning the new standard aims finally to be evidence-based.
http://www.tamurajones.net/FamilySearchReleasesGEDCOMX.xhtml
I think you're being a bit unfair holding vendors in this market place to a standard that doesn't exist elsewhere. Microsoft Word doesn't fully translate to Word Perfect. Power Point doesn't fully translate to Keynote. AutoCAD doesn't fully translate to its slew of alternatives. Yada yada yada. There is no utopia where competitors work together to ensure that customers are portable. At best these companies devote time and money to helping customers make the leap from someone else's proprietary system to their own.
You can use genealogy software and still keep your data portable. You just have to restrict your use of the software to those aspects that export to GEDCOM and will be successfully imported elsewhere. Family Tree Maker is a good choice for that in my opinion because its features often fall short of, rather than exceed, the GEDCOM standard. Still, it's up to you to identify the LCD among available software and stick with it.
All this presumes, of course, that your genealogy hobby would benefit from software. I'm not sure that's the case. If you don't know that the National Archives and Records Administration is the government entity that films and stores the census, then you're probably not too deep into this hobby. (NARA roll numbers [or their FHL counterparts] ought to be part of any source citation from a U.S. Census record.) This positions you well to avoid the pitfalls that come with the lack of data portability, should your hobby rise to the level of benefitting from software.
Some of your observations about GEDCOM are a bit off in my opinion. Although it has not been updated since 1999, it is the de facto standard, and it's not likely to be replaced anytime soon.
GEDCOM X is not a one man show. It was proposed by FamilySearch (the people who did the original GEDCOM) in Feb of this year. It may not become the new standard, but it has a lot of inertia by virtue of its past, and some of the proposals already aim to fix what ails previous editions of GEDCOM, meaning the new standard aims finally to be evidence-based.
http://www.tamurajones.net/FamilySearchReleasesGEDCOMX.xhtml