Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 15:32:43 -0500
From: "William M. Shubert" <wms@hevanet.com>
Subject: Re: SGF FF[4] - PLEASE READ

Sorry it took me so long, I've been really busy this past month.  I finally
got a few hours to look at the spec today.

My comments:

Why should "\<cr>" become a space?  Why not remove it completely?  This is
more like C (which the \ seems to be modelled on), plus that way if you
have a 200-character sequence with no spaces, you can *still* wrap your
text at the 78-column point.

^A..^Z: I still see absolutely no use for this.  Yuck.  If you want to
label your variations, why not use "LB[ef:A][sc:B]" and put an "A" and a
"B" in the text?

Multiple game types: I think that talking about non-Go games just clutters
up the spec.  If we want to support Othello too, why not have a "SGF" spec
and a "SOF" spec as spearate entities?

PL: Why say that if it is omitted, the viewer must not display whose turn
it is?

DD: Dave Fotland complained that this is hard to do with 3-d graphics.  I
don't see why, Dave?  Cgoban has had this all along...I just dither the
"board-with-stone" picture with the "board-without-stone" picture.

LB: Agree with Dave, LB should be limited to a very small number of
characters.

SL: It seems like we already have billions of ways to mark points.  To add
another one and say "do whatever you want" seems silly.  Either come up
with exactly how it looks or get rid of it.

ST: To provide a standrad way of being nonstandard just means that we'll
have lots of sgf files that don't look quite right.  Is anybody actually
planning on modifying their SGF viewer to be able to show variations in all
four of these different ways?

In general, besides these comment, I think that the spec is pretty good.
And the web page is well put together...thanks Arno!
-- 
				-Bill (wms@hevanet.com)
				 http://www.hevanet.com/wms/