Re: ZOOM - a complement to ZNG?

Mike Taylor wrote:

This is not a criticism of ZOOM, but I would like to take issue with
the following "problems."

> To recap, those problems include, but may not be limited to, the
> following:
> 
> 	New Z39.50 programmers find it hard to assimilate the big,
> 	scary standard document.

Perhaps we should put "Don't Panic" in big friendly letters on
the cover. Seriously though, I think any programmer worth his/her
salt shouldn't have any problems with it if they actually sat
down and looked at it for half a day.

> 	Building Z39.50 applications takes too long because it's
> 	generally necessary to write low-level networking code.

I've written two origins and a target and none of them needed
any low-level networking code as all that stuff is in the API
I use.

> 	Programmers find it difficult to write ASN.1/BER code. 

Maybe, but I've never had to write any ASN.1/BER code (see above.)

> 	The ASN.1/BER substrate is seen as old-fashioned.

So what. XML is a subset of SGML and how far back does SGML go?
I'll hazard a guess that it or GML go further back than ASN.1
or BER.

Regards,

Ashley.

-- 
Ashley Sanders                                a.sanders@mcc.ac.uk
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Received on Thursday, 27 September 2001 07:04:22 UTC