Mike Taylor wrote:

> Really?  It's hard for me to see how this is a good idea.  Surely our
> problem at the moment is how to improve take-up of SRU as it currently
> exists -- 

What do you think might improve the take-up of SRU? Or put another way,
why do you think people are slow/reluctant to use SRU?

> Not to mention bringing the
> resulting protocol yet closer to the Z39.50 it was deliberately
> designed to simplify.

Is SRU simpler than Z39.50? Both use obscure transports (SOAP v. ASN1 & 
BER) that have/had notorious interoperability problems. Both come with
an obscure query language that will be pretty daunting to the newcomer.

If you want to simplify z39.50 I think you can go a whole lot further
than SRU. And in the real world people do go a whole lot further than
SRU and go and create their own interfaces that hide behind urls that:

    o) may or may not be HTML form driven
    o) spit out a variety of stuff including HTML and XML.

Which is where the so-called 'Description Language' comes in.

Ashley.
-- 
Ashley Sanders               [log in to unmask]
Copac http://copac.ac.uk A Mimas service funded by JISC