RE: character sets: Term as OCTET STRING

Ray Denenberg wrote:
> And  why would  you need character set negotiation to apply to OCTET
STRING if you're using version 3? 


Because for historical and practical reasons many applications send Term as
an OCTET STRING regardless the Z39.50 version. You may say they shouldn't do
it, but that's the way it works. I never tested this, so I'm not sure, but I
think it might break a lot of interoperability if a Z39.50 client is going
to send Term as an InternationalString.
I checked the Bath profile, but it says nothing on this subject.

Further I was going to say that we have never decided to limit this to
version 2. However, now I see that in Ray's last mail on this subject, on
March 15, 2002, in the last phrase he writes:
"We can then amend the character set negotiation definition to say that if
version 2 is in force then negotiation applies to octet string when used as
the search term."

Sorry that I missed that. From the previous mails that Ralph and I sent on
this subject I thought it was clear that we did not intend to limit this to
a specific version of the Z39.50 protocol.


Pieter

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 11:08:48 UTC