Thank you Mike. A few points:

(1) I had assumed that Ralph was suggesting that the ability to request
record metadata be elevated to a first-level parameter, but I may have
misunderstood so let's assume your interpretation.

(2) The ability to retrieve a record's metadata according to a specific
metadata schema already exists.  You just retrieve that record and name that
schema in the record schema parameter (granted, that doesn't allow you to
get both the record data and its metadata at the same time, you need two
requests - not a big hardship).   So I agree with you that in this extension
we are developing, the ability to name a schema is overkill.

(3)
> I would also prefer that the metadata extension be self-contained,
> which means defining something like:
> &x-info-99-metadata=1
What does "1" signify here?

(4) I agree with Rob (actually with all three of you perhaps) that this
should not be overloaded onto the accept extension, which has "accept"
semantics, when what we are talking about is "request" semantics.

So I think we're nearly in synch.

--Ray