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!