Enter Your Reply

I wanted to make several additional comments here:
1. FEN is fine if you are dealing with some sort of standard board layout
with squares.  But, what do you do when you go multiple dimensions, or
hexes or other board formats?
2. Also, how does FEN send changes in a game state such that you are able
to tell if a given move is legal or not in a given environment?  I am not
saying you won't need something like a FEN to store a game state, or an
initial start position.  BUT, when it comes to checking legal moves that
would be like the case of Chinese Checkers (say you do multiple jumps) or
Progressive Chess, where players make an increasing number of moves? 
Would you send multiple FENs for each and every move?
3. How does a FEN recording games with stacks or multiple pieces in it,
and how they change?
4. What I am looking at here is something that would not only handled
chess, but other abstract strategy games, like Checkers, Chinese Checkers,
Go, Mancala and Focus.  
5. The focus of this approach, which also joins FEN, as another format. 
If you manage to get this right, then you could have universal FEN which
records all types of setups, and the move format also attached, so there
is the ability to roll back to see what the prior position was.  This
would offer redundancy in this to make it work.
6. The format I am discussing here is meant mainly for computer programs
to talk to one another.  While it is possible for people to manually to
enter it, that isn't really meant for it.  It is cumbersome.  
7. The format is meant to capture the minimal in change, without tying up
too much bandwidth.  It is meant as a one size captures all.  You could
even happen to have a way to compress the format even further.
8. As for how it works being different than the Game Courier, is that my
hope is this approach can map to the way the Game Courier works, and you
provide it as a different format for data transfer that can be added to
the Game Courier system.  Yes, I know I propose using : instead of - to
indicate to and from.  I would go with -, but I am aware some games may
have a board space with negative spaces.  I know, for example, Beyond
Chess, when you move tiles, the board spaces tend to spread out and board
positions end up in negative spaces.  As for what I am proposing, I don't
care if the symbols get changed.  I care that they do work though, and are
robust enough.   Again, this is an initial attempt, open for people to
change if they like.  What is seen here need not be a replacement, but it
can act as a Rosetta Stone of a sort to allow intersystem communications.