Re: [search-ws-comment] searchRetrieve Accept Parameters

[Tim Williams <williamstw@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Matthew Dovey<m.dovey@jisc.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Don't get me wrong, I'm supportive of urls that give some indication of the
>> format - and most implementors will likely expose different formats via
>> different URI patterns (its a little easier to dispatch on anyway), the question
>> is only whether that should be a part of the spec or not - and I suggest not.
>
> Some of the client applications built using SRU have been very thin clients
> consisting of little more than client side XSLT generating a HTML interface. It is
> because of these use cases, that there was pressure to ensure that there was a
> mechanism within the spec to achieve all the functionality via URLs

In such a case, it seems the guidance should be to generate your HTML
interface from a transform of the Explain descriptor.  Doing so, one
would simply parse the descriptor looking and target a URL with a
'type' attribute they understood (e.g.
select="url[@type='text/html']/@href) - same as Firefox does with an
OpenSearch descriptor.

--tim