> I am in favour of lowering the implementation barrier for 
> clients  but I don't think that is the same as encouraging 
> people  to write bad clients. Maybe it helps bad client 
> writers to write better clients -:) Increasing the 
> implementation barrier makes it more difficult to write good clients.

We agree with that - however there are certain things which whilst
lowering the barrier are also "bad"

For instance:

i) using XML rather than BER is a good way of lowering the
implementation barrier

ii) insisting (or implying) that the namespace prefix for SRW is always
srw so that a client can do regular expression matching on
srw:searchRetreiveResponse rather than looking for and using the prefix
defined in an xmlns: also lowers the implementation barrier but is "bad"

Matthew