- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 14:03:37 -0500 (EST)
- To: Matthew Dovey <matthew.dovey@las.ox.ac.uk>
- cc: "'Sebastian Hammer'" <quinn@INDEXDATA.DK>, "'ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au'" <ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au>, <www-zig@w3.org>
On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Matthew Dovey wrote: > > Tearing Z39.50 > > into little > > pieces will *never* make it more appealing to the W3C types > > who disqualify > > it for reasons of their own. > > I don't want to destroy Z39.50 (not yet anyway ;-)) and am unfortunately > only too aware of the politics of the W3C. Awww, c'mon guys. The politics you're aware of are the politics of the computing industry, where Z39.50 has barely been noticed. That world (with relatively little prompting from W3C) has lately gone apeshit over XML. There's no W3C anti-Z39.50 conspiracy at work here, just the natural consequences of Z39.50 failing to have set the world alight. If you want my personal view: Z39.50 could do with being available in bite-size chunks. If someone is writing an XML Schema for bibliographic content, or writing a spec (eg. UDDI) to characterise network accessible machine services, they currently have an all or nothing interaction with the Z world. There's a lack of simple recipies for being "Z friendly". Perhaps "bit sized chunks" is a metaphor for being chopped up and eaten? My preferred metadata system (RDF) has certainly suffered in the past for not being more obviously XML-friendly; I fear Z39.50 is in a far more vulnerable situation. Casting this as W3C XML zealots against the plucky Z39.50 outsider isn't going to help any of us understand what best to do. To put my own view totally on the table: Z39.50 will die unless it gets a bit more mainstream. Rightly or wrongly, mainstream now seems to mean XML, and that's something that goes beyond W3C to the computing industry at large. The challenge is to avoid throwing baby out with bathwater, and to identify the core ideas, architectures and vocabularies behind Z39.50 so the lessons of the past 20 years get deployed in the search systems of the next 20. IMHO etc., Dan ps. a couple of folks have asked about the possibility of having a daily digest version of the www-zig@w3.org list available. Right now it seems (http://www.w3.org/Mail/Request) that this isn't a feature we have configured for more than a couple of lists, though I'll pass on the request to the systems team. Full web-accessible archives of the www-zig list are available at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-zig/ though.
Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2000 14:04:09 UTC