RE: Next meeting

It's good to see that the Z39.50 crowd is at least aware of what's happening
in the real world :-)

I never had much hope for XER. Looking at it, that seems pretty well
justified. If it's ever going to go anywhere, it needs to be edited by some
folks who understand XML.

Some of the issues could be dealt with even at the level of mechanical
translation: simple types (especially integers and enumerated strings)
should be attributes, not elements. The Query structure looks even sillier
in XML than it does in ASN.1. Part of the reason must be that it's not even
an accurate translation, (an "op" isn't a choice between an operator and an
operand, is it?) Even if there's a desire to keep the model of binary
operations, the operations should be element names, so

<Or>
 <Op>
  <Attribute Set='Bib-1' Type='Use'>4</Attribute> . . .
<Term>Denenberg</Term>
 </Op>
 <Op> ... </Op>
</Or>

The WSDL work Matthew Dovey is doing looks quite promising!


--Denis