Re: Explain-lite (Explain discussion)

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Sebastian Hammer wrote:

> XML is currently a much sexier buzzword than ASN.1 - therein lies the main 
> difference. But other than that, I agree with ONE-2 on that one. Casting 
> Explain in ASN.1 rather than GRS.1 in the old days was a huge mistake 
> because it complicates subsequent extensions to the definition. Since 
> Explain doesn't have to require any GRS.1-specific functionality 
> (multilingual strings possible exception), I am totally happy doing it in 
> XML to lower the bar for newcomers.

This is not what I consider to be the main advantage of the Explain-Lite
approach. I think the fact that you can use channels outside the Z39.50
environment to transmit the information and then simply plug it in to your
client or gateway is much more important. Another factor is that you can
present the information to a human being in a web browser by adding a
stylesheet. This means that you can maintain the information in one single
place for all the different uses. No risk of different versions getting
out of sync. With some careful thought it should also be possible for
servers to automatically generate the information that goes in. That way,
we could ensure that the information is in sync with the server as well.

 
> The issue of dropping the current search/present based paradigm for Explain 
> is the real heavyweight. It allows a lot of flexibility which will 
> otherwise have to be built into the block that we load on top of our poor 
> init exchange...  that's going to take some real heavy analysis - and I 
> seriously hope the profile-meisters will allow time for that analysis (You 
> Know Who You Are), before they run along with a solution which is 
> superficially simpler but less thought-through.

I am one of the originators of this idea. My view from the start has been
that our current implementation is an experiment. The original design of
Explain turned out to be less than useful. This was probably because there
was not enough trial-and-error. By trying something that is useful to the
ONE-2 project, we hope to build the foundation for something that is
useful to a large part of the Z39.50 community.

Jacob Hallén
LIBRIS Department
The Royal Library
Sweden

Received on Friday, 17 November 2000 07:20:48 UTC