I have started a analysis survey about how PDN 3.0 tags are supported by many draughts softwares.
Regardless the current PDN scarce adoption condition I could see these main issues:
[1] GameType tag
Its support is very low even by commercial softwares.
On draughts game space where there are so many variants and part of them with common move pattern rules, the lack of this tag can cause a harder variants identification.
Sometimes it is impossible to be identified based only on played moves mostly when the tournament or match regulations are unknown.
In addition it can't allow a database management software gather statistics data from any PDN file based on draughts variant.
Comparing PDN with PGN specification, the PGN Variant tag usage is mandatory when is required to represent a non-standard variant for instance Chess960.
Why not promote GameType as a mandatory tag since PDN 3.1
[2] Clock & Rating related tags
Nowdays Clock related tag has a very poor support. Most of softwares doesn't write any Clock related tag for a played and saved game.
And many others don't offer a way to edit rating tags.
Since the clock time is an important condition to define player/game level strength and the rating tags (WhiteRating and BlackRating) aren't now widely used, is not possible create a 'clock time' based rating list from PDN files.
Now FMJD doesn't adopt yet different rating lists such as FIDE does for chess (Standard, Rapid and Blitz), but a helpful requirement to it be done for human or computer players would be start to encourage the Clock related tags usage.
Its might be done since PDN 3.1.
Please fell free for any comment or idea.
Thanks
Regards,
Igor
