On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Theo van Veen wrote:

> Mike, what do you mean by "Real Stuff"? And what pollution has been
> introduced?

The stylesheet, nextRecordPosition, echoedRequest and recordPosition
parameters all spring immediately to mind.

> In general I think that making responses self-explaining - regardless
> of the intelligence of the client - results in much more robust
> applications  than when clients have to keep track of the session
> history.

That makes little sense to me, I'm afraid.  Protocol responses have little
to do with the robustness of applications.  Including the above mentioned
parameters and the new databaseURL proposal make stupid clients easier to
write. If all a client needs to do is tack on some extra fields and the
server will do all their session management, then that's very useful for
stupid client writers.

In the same way that ZOOM addresses the complexity of writing a Z39.50
client, these additions have a purpose.  But, there needs to be a limit as
to how much server developers need to cater to stupid client developers.

I'm personally not in favour of the databaseURL, but if and when there's
an extension written up for it, I'll evalutate it for implementability.
Probably it'll be so easy that I'll spend longer reading the extension
document than it will take to implement it.

Rob

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