On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, stuart yeates wrote:
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Karen Coyle wrote:
The OL only has full text links, but the link goes to a page at the
Internet Archive that lists all of the available formats. I would prefer
that the link go directly to a display of the book, and offer other
formats from there (having to click twice really turns people off,
especially when they are browsing). So unfortunately, other than "full
text" there won't be more to say.
In an API, it would be _optimal_ if you'd reveal all these links, tagged
with a controlled vocabulary of some kind letting us know what they are, so
the client can decide for itself what to do with them (which may not even
be immediately showing them to any user at all, but may be analyzing them
for some other purpose).
Even better, for those of us who have multiple formats of full text (TEI XML,
HTML, ePub, original PDF, reflowed PDF, etc) expose multiple URLs to the full
text, differentiated using the mime-type.
Would different forms of processing have different mime-types? (ie, we
can tell it's a PDF, but can we tell what's actually in it?)
Personally, for the different packaging formats, if you're going to be
selecting using mime-type, I'd be inclined to hide it all behind a single
URL -- the user agent could set the appropriate Accept header, so long as
it's being served by HTTP.
...
I admit, it's possible that this works better for APIs than user browsing;
they might prefer a PDF for digital library objects, but prefer HTML for
other purposes. We were hoping to allow users to set cookies to set their
preferences on processing & packaging for our system, but I'm still
waiting for a response to the paperwork that I filed to be allowed to use
them.
(little known fact -- OMB M-00-13 outlaws cookies on all government
websites; OMB M-03-22 spells out some of the procedures for being allowed
around it, but I've given up trying to let them know, when they're set up
so bad you can't even report themm [3])
-Joe
[OMB M-00-13] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda_m00-13/
[OMB M-03-22] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda_m03-22/
[3] http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021887&cid=25678129
