Subject: Site review - Caxton Chess Encyclopedia Date: 1999/06/07 Author: Mark Weeks <100046.2106@compuserve.com> In the interest of keeping a guaranteed supply of fresh material flowing into this group, I decided to review each of the sites bookmarked on the main page. Six months ago, the first list had 9 or 10 sites, and now there are 21. If I review one site every week or so, there will be six months of this, allowing time off for vacation & sloth. Living in a glass house myself, I won't throw many stones. I'm more interested in documenting the 'state of the Net' on the specialized subject of chess history. The DejaNews software automatically orders the bookmarks alphabetically, so I'll follow the same order. Skipping the tool bookmarks, the first site is the 'Caxton Chess Encyclopedia' by Eric Schiller at http://www.chessworks.com/caxton/caxton.htm. This is one of the more recent additions to the list. Dr. Schiller is a well known chess author & presence on the international chess scene. One of my favorite books is 'Fighting Chess' by Gary Kasparov, which was published by American Chess Promotions in 1983 & which Schiller translated. It covers Kasparov's career through the 1982 Moscow Interzonal and the 25th Olympiad at Luzern, the period before FIDE and Soviet chess politics turned him bitter against chess authorities. Schiller is a frequent target of Edward Winter's venom. If you want proof, see Winter's June 1998 column at 'The Chess Cafe' (http://www.chesscafe.com/text/winter11.txt), titled 'Raymond Keene and Eric Schiller'. The fact that Winter thinks Schiller is fair game attests to Schiller's importance to the study of chess history. The Caxton material is part of the larger site http://www.chessworks.com/, which has scattered links & references to http://www.chesscity.com/. I suspect that Schiller is involved with this site as well. The Caxton Chess Encyclopedia is 'an online resource for information about chess tournaments, players, games, rules and other aspects of the Royal Game'. Portions of it appear to be database driven, although those pages seem not to be built dynamically. The main Caxton page has two primary links -- the 'Switchboard' and the 'Historical Rating Lists'. The switchboard is a small page with links to three 'lists', each dated 8 October 1998. The 'Event List' covers seven chess events from 1575 to 1824, with minimum information about each event. The 'Player List' covers 15 players from Ajeeb to Brien, giving nationality, date of birth & death, and a two line summary of each player's career. The 'Rating List' covers 23 players from Alapin to Englisch over the period 1850-1898. None of the three lists links to other pages. The page for the historical rating lists mentions that it was last updated on 2 October. It has one link for 'Ratings for 1851 through 1859' which is a 108K page listing the events which were rated and ratings per player per year. Morphy, for example, is rated 2310 in 1857 and 2385 in 1858. The other links on the main Caxton page point to the same resources, plus the 'World Rankings, February 1999', a 172K sample database of opening names, and a 111K trivia page. I did a browser search for the word 'film' on the trivia page, and found a few references. This subsite states that it is work in progress. The visible dates are from eight months ago, so it appears that progress has stopped. Done properly, this is an ambitious idea. Since Dr. Schiller undoubtedly has other ongoing projects, I doubt that he has the time to do this alone and it may remain unfinished.