Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

What is wrong with PGN (= Portable Game Notation)?

This format contains the name of the variant (or game) in its header tags,
so the exact move syntax could be dependent to the requirements of the game.
For Chess-like games it uses SAN (Standard Algebrac Notation)format to
describe the moves. This is a pretty universal format. (It could also be
used for games like Go, Draughts or Othello, where moves have unambigously
defined side effects, once the move or drop of a single piece is specified.
If a game needs multiple moves per turn, SAN could be extended with a
concatenation operator, say '&', to string together all moves that make
up one turn, and you would already capture an enormously larger number of
games.)

Why re-invent the wheel, if we already have bicycles?

PGN will be able to handle every single game on here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Game_Notation

The main thing is that people agree to what will be used more than what it
is.

Well, WinBoard usually saves games in PGN. There is an obsolete dedicated
format, but no one hardly ever uses it, and it is there only for backward
compatibility.

Well, the idea I am looking at is an extended version of PGN for a wider
range of games.  I wanted to see if anyone was interested in this.  I
don't think PGN is sufficiently robust to handle all the Game Courier
games.

Oh, I am sure the notation of the actual moves would have to be extended
here and there. Like I already mentioned for concatenating atomic moves by
'&' in cases where a turn contains more moves, or a move consists of more
steps.

The best way to approach this is to go through the games until you find
one that poses a problem, and then add some general mechanism to the
notation standard that would solve every problem of that kind. And repeat
that. Ten you usually run out of problems pretty quickly. Especially as
the community playing that game might already have solved the problem for
you, as they could not have avoided stumbling on it before.

It isn't a matter of what can be come up with.  You can see one approach I
worked on:
http://abstractgamers.org/wiki/iago-notation

It is a matter of what people can agree to.

Well, you can be pretty sure that they will not agree to it if it is not
either upward compatible with, or highly superior to what they are already
using. What you propose on the IAGO site is neither.

For Chess variants, the existing PGN standard, with a few obvious
generalizations (e.g. to allow larger number of ranks and files, and other
letters for piece indicators), seems entirely satisfactory. Even games with
large player bases and a long tradition, like Xiangqi and Shogi, which have
their own notation systems, are starting to recognize he advantage of
algebraic nottion, and are embracing variations on Standard Algebraic
Notation. Now it exists next to th traditional notation, but Chess also
has alternative notations, such as the infamous descriptive notation
('N-KB3'), which are slowly but surely losing ground against SAN.

Where a player base is virtually non-existing, traditonal notation methods
(or in fact any notation method) might not exist, and any system will be
easily adapted.

So in short: to get wide-spread acceptance of a standard, first look to
the main-stream games, how they prefer to do it, and design something that
accomodates their wishes. Otherwise, failure is a guarantee. To a Chess
player, it will not seem an advntage that his saved game can be read by
software that plays Go, so his willingness to compromise to make that
easier will be zero.