PGN. The Chess Portable Notation.
The Chess Portable Notation is obsolete. The new innovations in web design, including the difference between front-end and back-end are growing very quickly.
PGN and the "chess websites"
The new platform chess24 was made to be the top one digital chess platform, they are doing a good job. Altought the idea of the PGN Group was to create an open source hierarchy format for displaying chess games I think that chess24 couldn't develop their big chess bussines website without this open idea.
"I don't know if chess24 understand the philosophy behind "free software" but they understand the social business"
I don't know if chess24 understand that philosophy but they understand the social business, they provide power and free solutions for all players levels like chess analysis, live chess events, online blitz and more, However there are ideas that they could liberate for doing their platform more robust and get more engagement, for example, possibility to download PGN games.
Free software like "Chess.js" Jeff Hylwa
I am following the "Chess.js" github project, an open source javascript chess validator to determine legal chess moves and load PGN files into external chessboards among other functionalities. The chess.js project is under construction, by the way you can download and 'fork' the project to solve a lot of problems developing a chess website.
Everyday you can read about problems with chess websites and theirs PGN saved games on the chess.js forum boards, problems about bad specification or disambiguation are typical issues to solve by volunteers. I think the chess.js developer thoughts are very similar to PGN Group free software convictions.
Chess24 and Chess.com VS. Chessbase
Chess24 and Chesscom are fighting versus Chessbase, three big competitors in the digital chess market. Chessbase grows thanks to develop his own format to save and reproduce chess games. Chessbase group develop Fritz, their power chess module. Those things were good when Internet was too slow and there was not social thinking. The market fights monopolies with bravery.
The story of FICS vs. ICS will be repeated on time, Chessbase had the chess market monopoly and also did monopolization creating their own format. To defend Chessbase we can say they develop their format before PGN was an idea but protect it is not a good idea in the XXI century.
By the way Chessbase allows you to download games PGN formatted! Unbelievable!! .I can say PGN Group developed a strong and powerful format.
Chess Games Web Archive ?
Develop a new format instead PGN is not enough, I am not saying that chess games need a new hierarchy format. Maybe we need a big and nice server to display all games on history. The same as Internet Web Archive but for chess games. The third parties can develop their software, for learning chess, for interpretate or analyze chess games computationally etc... but the games will be intact like repositories.
We can compare chess games to medical ontologies, the tree structure is hard to grow and technicians will be happy if they have the job made before.
This text is copyleft by @Boky1 and refered in https://english.bokyopinion.info
