Defining an unique standard for the recording of bridge hands

[VJ]

Because of its dominant position on the international scene, it appears to me BBO should be leader in proposing an ISO format for the recording of bridge hands, associated with a standard for the bidding of it, and another one for the play of its cards. All of them should be nicely printable in Open Office tools, in isolation or combination.

 

I am ready to help. My former role as a Standards architect may be useful.

 

Rationale: I am tired of having to retype hands in my bridge publications and bridge tools. The tools should all be able to export and import bridge hands in the To Be Defined standard.

[1eyedjack]

Not an area of any expertise on my part, but is there not already a standard? ie, PBN? Or even 2 standards, if you include LIN? Maybe you are suggesting that one should be ditched in favour of having just the one standard?

 

I note that DDS these days saves in SQL format. Which I gather is not bespoke to bridge, but was preferred for handling large volumes of data.

[VJ]

Not an area of any expertise on my part, but is there not already a standard? ie, PBN? Or even 2 standards, if you include LIN? Maybe you are suggesting that one should be ditched in favour of having just the one standard?

 

I note that DDS these days saves in SQL format. Which I gather is not bespoke to bridge, but was preferred for handling large volumes of data.

 

Thanks for your comments. As you say, there are the formats that you listed, but many other ones as well, and to my knowledge, none satisfactory and deserving the name of standard, after a thorough review of the requirements.

[patroclo]

I think that today there isn t a need of another standard

[ahydra]

On the grounds of https://xkcd.com/927/ I'd suggest trying to use/improve PBN rather than create something from scratch.

 

Also, wouldn't a single standard be sufficient to cover both bidding and play?

 

ahydra

[nige1]

Richard Pavlicek defines a concise format. PBN is popular but more verbose.

 

There seem to be at least 2 BBO formats, used for millions of hands, including most recent top-level and International competition. IMO the format used in this forum is a de-facto standard. This BBO handviewer format has the enormous advantage of facilitating on-line display of hands on web-pages e.g. in blogs. You can use it for static display -- or as a Bridge movie with bid-by-bid and card-by-card explanations -- and access to GIB. Thus, this BBO format is veratile and concise. It can be coded in plain ASCII or UTF-8 text. It is s easy to write, read and understand. Deals can be stored in an SQL or other database.

[barmar]

I believe the handviewer and bridge movie are the same, they're both BBO's LIN format.

[VJ]

On the grounds of https://xkcd.com/927/ I'd suggest trying to use/improve PBN rather than create something from scratch.

 

Also, wouldn't a single standard be sufficient to cover both bidding and play?

 

ahydra

 

I agree we should reuse as much as possible and build on the existing. Yes an unique standard, but file formats varying on the purpose. LIN should for sure be one of the building stones. We however need an initiative or support from big entities, like BBO and/or perhaps big puplishers or a syndicate of bridge authors or...

[VJ]

Richard Pavlicek defines a concise format. PBN is popular but more verbose.

 

There seem to be at least 2 BBO formats, used for millions of hands, including most recent top-level and International competition. IMO the format used in this forum is a de-facto standard. This BBO handviewer format has the enormous advantage of facilitating on-line display of hands on web-pages e.g. in blogs. You can use it for static display -- or as a Bridge movie with bid-by-bid and card-by-card explanations -- and access to GIB. Thus, this BBO format is veratile and concise. It can be coded in plain ASCII or UTF-8 text. It is s easy to write, read and understand. Deals can be stored in an SQL or other database.

 

I agree LIN is a good foundation, and serves well its current purposes. But it is not a de facto standard -just a nice remedy to limited and pressing requirements-. It however deserves an upwards compatibility to a real standard. LIN format is not addressing the issues I mentioned in this topic, and is not the result of a comprehensive analysis of the requirements towards a solution enabling a single manual encoding of a hand, its corrections if any, its history as an object, and its publication and easy editing in text processors.