Re: forwarded message from Dirk Herr-Hoyman

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sat, 17 Jul 93 16:49:53 -0500

Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl writes:
> At the IIIR group on the IETF I heard that someone was writing up a
> dsescription of Z39.50 as currently in use by WAIS over TCP/IP, and
> would submit it as an informational RFC. (Sorry, I've forgotten the
> details.) This might be relevant, as it will make Z39.50 much more
> accessible to developers (the ISO standard is unreadable in my
> eyes).
>
> And isn't there native support for Z39.50/WAIS in the next version
> of libWWW, meaning there is already a possibility for peaceful
> coexistence?

Yup -- in fact, I've got freeWAIS 0.1 linked happily with Mosaic 2.0
(development version) via libwww2.

On a related topic, at IANET in Pittsburgh, Jim Fullton & others came
to a general consensus that it'd be nice to allow WAIS to separate
indexing from retrieval -- the upshot would be that WAIS could, in
response to queries, return URL's and URN's that do *not* necessarily
correspond to documents within a traditional-style WAIS database.
E.g. you could get back a list of hits like this:

gopher://foobar.com/argh/blargh
news:13523514514253@2314654321545132.34154351453
http://yoyodyne.com/bigboote/john
...

This would be unbelievably sweet.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
DAMN but it's hot out...