RE: looking again for packaging interest

Larry Masinter wrote:

With regard to the 'catalog problem', I was pointed to where
Multipart/Related doesn't help:
> >
> >http://www.w3.org/1999/07/xml-pkg234/Overview#collecting
> >Bullet items 1 and 3 require a client-side decision to determine which
> >components of a collection are needed.  How does the client make this
decision?
...
> Part of the problem with creating a 'catalog' is that there might be
> different catalogs for different purposes. If you're going to feed
> it all into a text-to-speech converter, maybe you don't need the
> CSS-for-printing.

As you correctly point out, the problem has two parts:

1) how to decide what to include in a package
2) how to format the package

Perhaps RDDL (http://www.rddl.org) helps the first part of the problem: One
can subset a collection of URI related resources by nature and purpose each
of which are expressed as a URI.

For example a packaging HTPP request might indicate a subset by request
headers e.g:

RDDLPurpose: http://www.rddl.org/purposes#software-package
RDDLNature:
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/multipart/related

and the response might be a multipart package whereas:

RDDLPurpose: http://www.rddl.org/purposes#software-package
RDDLNature:
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/pkzip

might request the same collection formatted as a zip or perhaps jar.

these natures and purposes are only examples, but the point is that the
client can request a subset of the full catalog or directory, and the server
can package and return this.

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org

Received on Saturday, 3 February 2001 15:44:17 UTC