> So I am afraid I disagree with Matthew on this one. I think 
> SRU/SRW should have a small simple API. I think it was Theo 
> who was in favor of having the same power in SRU and SRW 
> requests - by defining all requests as having a simple list 
> of (possibly optional) arguments effectively of type string 
> (I am paraphrasing here). This is all you get with SRU. And a 
> goal was to *try* and keep SRW not that dis-similar to SRU.


Errrm - I think I've been arguing for that too (namely liase SRU/SRW, keep
the request down to parameters which can be URL encoded as well as SOAP
encoded) from the very beginning! *If* we did use an XML encoding for
queries, then it would have to be send as a string value in an SRU request
(OK it would look a little messier, but we still have to URLEncode CQL to get
rid of spaces etc. anyway...).

Matthew