> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Taylor [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 10:47 AM
>
> Suppose you're writing a server.  A client sends a search against a
> CQL prefix "title".  Now your back-end configuration doesn't know
> anything about that prefix.  All it knows about is "bib.title" and
> "heraldry.title".  So what does it do?  Well, it could just fault the
> search: that's perfectly legitimate but doesn't strike me as very
> helpful.  If you want to make life nice for the poor user (or the poor
> multi-casting search gateway) you'll guess that it probably meant
> bib.title and go ahead on that basis.

Sorry, but the ZIG has spent the last five or six years recovering from the
problems caused when we originally did that.  Clients would sent me an
Author search.  I didn't have an Author index, but I did have a Names index.
So I turned the Author search into a Name search because bad results are
better than no results.

The ZIG played with the idea of semantic switches that would permit or
forbid that kind of stuff and we have finally settled on flat forbidding it.
Let's not recapitulate that process in SRW!

Ralph