On 30 April 2010 16:56, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> On 30 April 2010 16:42, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> 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? Well, that's what the "Community Profiles" are. So now you have TWO long, dense, boring documents to read -- the standard and the profile! The main game in town for Making OpenURL 1.0 Usable (maybe still the only game, come to think of it) is the San Antonio Profile, or SAP for short, which you can get here: http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/docs/pdf/SanAntonioProfile.pdf Happily, it's only eight pages long (i.e. the same length as the entire original OpenURL 0.1 specification). The bad news is, they are incredible dense pages. Sample statement: D.5.5 Transports Transports define how to transport representations of ContextObjects over the network. Table D.7 lists the Transports supported by the San Antonio Community Profiles. The By-Value OpenURL Transport and the By-Reference OpenURL Transport (over HTTP and HTTPS) may be used to transport ContextObjects represented by means of the Key/Encoded-Value and the XML ContextObject Format. In case of the Key/Encoded-Value representation, only a single ContextObject may be transported. In case of the XML representation, one or more ContextObjects may be transported. The Inline OpenURL Transport may only be used to transport a single ContextObject represented using the KEV ContextObject Format. Have fun with that!