RE: W3C XQL workshop

> From: Jim Davis [mailto:jdavis@parc.xerox.com]
> I think it's also reasonable to consider, from the library 
> point of view,
> whether LDAP might work as well as DASL.  Do you have any 
> thoughts on that?

I can't really believe you made that suggestion.  The objections that the
Web community has consistently expressed about Z39.50 are it's statefulness,
binary encoding and transmission over raw tcp/ip.  LDAP has all those
deficiencies.  In addition, it has a really weak searching mechanism.

The other thing that surprises me is that you don't automatically think that
z39.50 and DASL have a natural alignment.  I just reread your requirements
document.  At the end of it are a list of related documents.  4 of the 5
documents listed are z39.50 documents.  It's clear that we have many of the
same requirements.  You've also made many of the hard decisions that we did,
including using a non-human-enterable query grammar.

I still think there's a natural convergence opportunity for the two
standards and will continue to investigate it.

Ralph

Ralph LeVan
Research Scientist
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
http://www.oclc.org/~levan

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 1998 09:35:47 UTC