RE: Explain-lite (Explain discussion)

> Whilst I agree with Sebastian's view that Explain is the way it is for a
> reason and probably has a number of advantages over Explain-lite, E-Lite has
> the advantage that it is being used whereas however technically good Explain
> maybe it just hasn't been adopted

Wow. Big claim. We have supported it for years and use it on all our sites.
It might not have been adopted widely, just like many vendors have not
upgraded to V3 over V2. The biggest problem that I saw is that people do
not know what information clients want to receive and don't want to
implement everything because its lots of effort.

> I think part if this is that Explain by addressing the more
> complicated requirements is too complicated for the simple application which
> is what most people (at least initially) would want to implement.

I hear this a lot. Could someone summarise in one or two sentences the
information content Explain Lite supports that makes it better?
(For example, we added the CCLInfo category to Explain to make it
easier (possible!) to do CCL->RPN translations.) I am wondering if
the Explain Lite could be a category within the Explain database
where the category has an XML and ASN.1 encoding defined.

In terms of making Z39.50 more accessible to the world, I think
two things would help here without changing the actual standard.
(1) An XML encoding of packets (XER etc)
(2) A document describing a subset of Z39.50 for doing init, search,
    present, close (+ the explain lite category? :-)

Alan

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 19:04:08 UTC