> Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:49:18 -0400
> From: Ray Denenberg <[log in to unmask]>
>
> The point [of the document we're all arguing about] is that there
> will be a way to express the intended semantics of the index.)
Ray and everyone,
I honestly do not imagine that one single person in the whole world
will look at this document in order to understand the semantics of a
CQL qualifier. Seriously: can you imagine it? "Now, what does
titleWord mean? Oh, I see it's defined as the combination of _this_
attribute from the Utility Set, and _this_ one from the Cross Domain
set, and _this_ one from the BIB-2 set. I wonder what these
'attribute' thingies are?"
Do we really believe that there is so much as a single developer out
there who, in that situtation, would go to all the trouble of finding
out what an "attribute" is, how they fit into "attribute sets" and how
their use is described by the "attribute architecture"; and then go
off and read the various attribute set semantics documents?
It ain't gonna happen. Every single developer will just go, "Oh,
titleWord: that means a word in the title".
I was not joking when I proposed my alternative CQL qualifer semantics
document. I truly feel that it would be more useful to the community
that the white elephant being worked on now.
(Caveat: the CQL->Z39.50 mapping _is_ potentially useful for people
implementing gateways, though in practice you can bet the last two
feet of your lower intestine that people making gateways to actual
servers will have to tweak the "offical" mappings to make them work
right anyway.)
> > I also disagree that SRW's existance mandates a Z39.50 basis.
>
> What I'm saying is that srw's existence mandates *the possibility
> of* Z39.50
!!!
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
-- Vroomfondel and Majikthise, philosophers.
> > I suggest an explain tag per index which records if it supports
> > proximity or not. If it doesn't then a multi word search term
> > would be treated as implicit AND as oposed to implicit PROX.
>
> That just seems to me too complicated and too confusing.
Here, at least, I agree! I strongly oppose this tendency to bundle
more and more stuff into explain. If we learned one less from Explain
Classic (we did, didn't we? _Please_ say we did! :-) it is surely
that if it's too complicated, no-one will implement it. Let's not
fall into that trap again.
_/|_ _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\ "Sixteen is a compromise between not very many and quite a
lot" -- Mike Selway.
