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FamilySearch / gedcomx

An open data model and an open serialization format for exchanging genealogical data.
http://www.gedcomx.org
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Related standards should remain available from well-known URLs #273

Closed nealmcb closed 10 years ago

nealmcb commented 10 years ago

It appears that the widely-used GEDCOM 5.5 and 5.5.1 specifications, which used to be available from the FamilySearch site at e.g. https://familysearch.org/developers/docs/gedcom, are no longer there, as reported here:

Is this just a mistake during a site redesign or something? Keeping historical URLs active is important, see, e.g. Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don't change.. And as we move to updated standards, it is important that people be able to refer to related historical standards for writing converters etc.

Can folks here help sort this out?

stoicflame commented 10 years ago

Oh. Sure. I can probably get those back up. It was likely just a mistake. Nobody around here (including myself) knew that putting those documents there constituted some kind of formal contract. I'll take a look when I get back into the office on Monday.

You know, we should probaby mint some "canonical" URIs for those documents like we did for the GEDCOM X specifications. That way we can put them somewhere that they'll be maintained with a greater level of rigor.

Tamura's article makes me grin. He sounds like a World Cup player wailing on the ground clutching his shin.

nealmcb commented 10 years ago

Thanks! Just as I expected. And yes, careful design of URIs in general is really helpful on the web, but of course it is hard to do early in the game....

nealmcb commented 10 years ago

Oh, and I first heard about this at Talk:GEDCOM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - so we can wrap it up there also when the dust settles. I'd guess that making them available at nice clean long-lived links, with a permanent redirect from their historical locations, would be best.

stoicflame commented 10 years ago

Okay, I cannot for the life of me find any history of those links ever being at familysearch.org/developers. That site has always been managed by Git repository, and I've raked through the entire history of the repository using different patterns of "gedcom" and such, and I can find no references to those specs ever being there.

Can anyone give me a comprehensive list of files that are missing and what dates they were known to be there? I'll check out the repository on that date and see if I can figure out what it looked like.

nealmcb commented 10 years ago

Here's one example I just dug out. There is currently a redirect "301 Moved Permanently" at

to

It was linked to from the GEDCOM article on wikipedia, and was changed to a third-party link in this edit on 2014-03-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GEDCOM&diff=600454866&oldid=591419391

Some more dead/replaced links are listed there.

If you need help digging out when they were added on Wikipedia I can help find the script that searches the revision history.

The tamurajones.net folks might have more insights.

stoicflame commented 10 years ago

Okay, well, I put up a page at those URLs.

Thanks again for the report.