In this paper, we solve two open problems posed by Karen L. Bernstein regarding her promoted tyft format for structured operational semantics. We show that, unlike formats with closed terms as labels, such as the tyft format, the well-foundedness assumption cannot be dropped for the promoted tyft format while preserving the congruence result. We also show that the well-founded promoted tyft format is incomparable to the tyft format with closed terms as labels, i.e., there are transition relations that can be specified by the promoted tyft format but not by the tyft format, and vice versa. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.