RE: character encoding assumptions and approaches

> Please give this some thought.

Whatever we do now, let's face it, it is going to be a workaround. In
someways I agree with Jo and Ralph (whoops, there goes my credibility!!)
that the OID approach is the easiest to implement but it is a hack.

The attribute architecture was an admittance that we'd gone wrong with
attribute sets and bib-1 and an attempt to put us back on track with a
complete re-engineering. It does a good job of not requiring a new
version of Z39.50 (i.e. it should work on any version 3 server) but it
isn't backwards compatible. At some point we will have to declare bib-1
obsolete and move over to bib-2 et al. It also requires some work to
implement (expecially all those alledged version 3 servers out there who
just ignore the attribute set requested and use bib-1 anyway - you know
who you are!).

Lets do a quick hack for the character set negotiation for the time
being, but I do think that the time is rapidly approaching where we need
to do for the present what the attribute architecture aimed to do for
search. We have got into a muddle over syntax, schema, character set,
functional subsets (best term I can come up with for the different
flavours of MARC21 such as authority, bibliographic, holdings etc.) and
probably language negotiation (which is distinct but different from
character set) for retrieving records and perhaps we should re-engineer
this from scratch with the benefit of hindsight for a Z39.50 Version 4.

Matthew

Received on Wednesday, 6 March 2002 03:58:43 UTC