On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 18:47, Owen Stephens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Could you expand on how you think the problem that OpenURL tackles would
> have been better approached with existing mechanisms?

As we all know, it's pretty much a spec for a way to template incoming
and outgoing URLs, defining some functionality along the way. As such,
URLs with basic URI templates and rewriting have been around for a
long time. Even longer than that is just the basics of HTTP which have
status codes and functionality to do exactly the same. We've been
doing link resolving since mid 90's, either as CGI scripts, or as
Apache modules, so none of this were new. URI comes in, you look it up
in a database, you cross-check with other REQUEST parameters (or
sessions, if you must, as well as IP addresses) and pop out a 303
(with some possible rewriting of the outgoing URL) (with the hack we
needed at the time to also create dummy pages with META tags
*shudder*).

So the idea was to standardize on a way to do this, and it was a good
idea as such. OpenURL *could* have had a great potential if it
actually defined something tangible, something concrete like a model
of interaction or basic rules for fishing and catching tokens and the
like, and as someone else mentioned, the 0.1 version was quite a good
start. But by the time when 1.0 came out, all the goodness had turned
so generic and flexible in such a complex way that handling it turned
you right off it. The standard also had a very difficult language, and
more specifically didn't use enough of the normal geeky language used
by sysadmins around. The more I tried to wrap my head around it, the
more I felt like just going back to CGI scripts that looked stuff up
in a database. It was easier to hack legacy code, which, well, defeats
the purpose, no?

Also, forgive me if I've forgotten important details; I've suppressed
this part of my life. :)


Kind regards,

Alex
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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