There are three tag path formats relevant here:
- Basic Tag Paths with just a tag provider,
- Basic Tag Paths with historian+gateway+tag provider stuffed into the provider brackets, and
- Qualified Paths with a flexible expanded format.
The first format just delegates to the tag provider to supply the actual details needed to find the history. The other formats must spell it all out. The newer QualifiedPath format was created for 8.x and is the preferred form in Perspective. The expanded Basic TagPath format is the legacy Vision format.
Scripts are supposed to accept all three.
Discussion here with more details (and further links):
If the "old format" is broken for you (in scripts), that is a bug that should be reported. I'm not really sure how well Perspective is supposed to support the 2nd form, or how well Vision is supposed to support the 3rd form. Documentation is lacking, and firm details to even write the documentation is hard to find.