> On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 11:57:45AM +0100, Matthew Dovey wrote:
> > Apologies it was Alan who started being sensible.
>
> Gosh! Someone finally thinks I am being sensible? :-) :-) :-)
>
>
> Actually, my interest in result set nameing is more can a result
> set name be used in a following CQL query?
At one point I think we agreed this? Certainly this is my view (so we
can combine result sets and in the simplest form just send a result set
name as the query to get the next 10 results).
> If so, the user needs
> to type in the name don't they? *If* (and it is a big if) this is
> the case, then I think result set names need to make sense to users,
> hence I think the client needs to propose it. If its not the case,
> the server can allocate the name no problems.
No, No, No, No, No (you've stopped being sensible now Alan!). Typically
users shouldn't be typing in CQL. There should be a nice easy to use
interface allowing them to build queries, manipulate previous sets etc.
If the interface wants to show nice user friendly names it should deal
with the mapping to and from the real result set ids (the server need
never know about this at all).
<soap-box-time>
SRW and classic Z39.50 define on the wire client server protocols - they
don't define how things should be displayed to the end user. I quite
despair of the number of bad Z39.50 clients out there which insist on
exposing Z39.50 terminology to confused end users (gateways that ask
users to select "Z39.50 targets" rather than "library catalogues" etc.);
or about some of the endless ZIG discussions which are really discussing
the user interface not the Z39.50 standard itself!
</soap-box-time>
SRU confuses this slightly as typically the thin web browser (e.g. the
XSL interface that Theo? Has put together) is limited in what it can do
as regards a UI compared to a full blown SOAP client. Like Rob
Sanderson, I'm not entirely sure how much SRU will be used over and
above SRW but providing we keep the spec. closely aligned SRU just falls
out of SRW (URL encoding versus SOAP for the request, and XML encoding
versus SOAP for the response).
Matthew
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