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Reinhard, I am not sure what you are trying to say. How can you separate
variant-dependent naming from the FEN standard? The FEN is one of the few
places where pieces are named in the first place.

In PGN the problems are far smaller, as these have a variant tag. So a PGN
game always unambiguously specifies the variant it is for. And indeed I
exploit that in WinBoard: if you paste a OGN game into WinBoard, it
automatically switches to the variant the PGN is for. FENs encountered in
this context can benifit from the fact that the variant is known as well.

The problem is isolated FENs, in particular isolated FENs for non-starting
positions. I have not found a way to deduce the vriant from looking at the
FEN string. So FENs that obviously must belong to a different variant as
the current one, because they use non-valid piece letters or wrong board
size, are simply rejected when ou paste them into WinBoard.

It seems to me you want the variant (and by inference the rules) to be
recognizable from the FEN, without prefixing the FEN with an explicit
variant name. Otherwise there would be no reason, for instance, to specify
the type of castling in the FEN.

I think predefining many pieces in a standard is self-defeating, as you
would be forced to pick letters for pieces that are unacceptable to those
playing the particular variant, even long before you would run out of
letters. So the only thing universal in such a 'standard' would be that
it is universally not used...

The major variants (Xiangqi, Chess, Shogi, Capablanca) are fortunately
recognizable from their board size, and this could be used to define a
default piece encoding acceptable to that variant. You will never get
(Western) Shogi players to have the Gold general represented by anything
like G, or Xiangqi players to represent the Cannon by anything else but
C...