- From: Sebastian Hammer <quinn@indexdata.dk>
- Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2001 17:10:31 +0100
- To: Robert Waldstein <wald@library.ho.lucent.com>, www-zig@w3.org
At 09:00 08-03-01 -0500, Robert Waldstein wrote: > So I think the proposal is to make OIDs a choice with a STRING everywhere >they appear in Z39.50 - can this be done in a reasonable time frame, and >does it require reballoting the whole standard? Or is this an over- >simplification and each OID needs to be looked at? Would there be a golden middle ground in *only* changing the schema identifier to support string types to begin with? In an XML world, it is clearly the most volatile element: We don't invent new record syntaxes that often, but everybody and his neighbour has their own schema. Thes requires a modification to the Specification structure under CompSpec... It *IS* part of the protocol, but, I'd wager, a much less used part of the protocol than the Record Syntax. The other place where I predict we will soon need to identify XML schemas is in the query, where we would like to address specific elements by tag path (preferably by using the existing XPath syntax) rather than by USE attributes. In a community that defines itself by XML-based data models, the tag-paths, after all, are probably the closest thing to abstract access points that you will find. However, this could be handled simply by introducing a new Query type - the same way it was done in Z39.50-1992 to support proximity queries. Eventually, there are a number of little places in the protocol that would be touched by embracing an XML-based view of things (using a very broad interpretation of the term "XML-based"). These things should be done, but I think its possible and desirable to do so in an incremental way which allows gradual development, implementation, and experimentation with a minimum impact on interoperability. --Sebastian -- Sebastian Hammer <quinn@indexdata.dk> Index Data ApS Ph.: +45 3341 0100 <http://www.indexdata.dk> Fax: +45 3341 0101
Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 11:10:39 UTC