Re: forwarded message from Dirk Herr-Hoyman

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 93 16:49:53 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9307172149.AA11360@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: forwarded message from Dirk Herr-Hoyman 
In-reply-to: <9307170953.AA05955=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
References: <9307170018.AA10123@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
	<9307170953.AA05955=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
X-Md4-Signature: 68f8a348311c6e01e3c44c081a91f5ca
Status: RO
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...