On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Mike Taylor <m...@indexdata.com> wrote: > On 30 April 2010 16:42, Ed Summers <e...@pobox.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Ross Singer <rossfsin...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Just to clarify -- OpenURL 1.0 does not assume HTTP is being used. >> >> Oh, so that's the problem! > > Yes! Exactly! > > Poor old OpenURL 1.0 is abstracted to hell and back. The sad old > thing doesn't even know what transport it's running on (why? Because > Abstraction Is Good, not because anyone actually had any reason for > wanting to use a different transport than HTTP), and as a result it > can't assume it has, for example, the ability for the transport to > report errors. >
Of course, per Eric's earlier comment, there's no reason why we can't take what's there and refine it so that there are assumptions like HTTP and optimize it to actually *work* in such an environment. Is there? -Ross. > It's a shame. I can see the reasons why the committee took it the way > they did, but the whole exercise has ended up smelling of architecture > astronautics. See this column if you're not familiar with the term, > it's a good read: > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html >