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