DIENST, some comments

Bert Bos (bert@let.rug.nl)
Thu, 8 Sep 1994 13:01:04 +0200

The Dienst draft specifies a much-needed protocol for efficient
electronic publishing. People don't like to retrieve megabytes of
Postscript only to discover that the text is of no use to them.
Dienst's search and page-by-page facilities deserve to be implemented
as soon as possible.

An especially nice feature is that it doesn't require any browser
changes, although a modified browser could offer more functionality.

In view of the above, my comments do not question the concept per se,
but I have some suggestions for changes in the details.

I think the most important change is in the naming of the data types
returned by the Dienst server. In nearly all cases the server returns
data identified as "text/plain" or "text/x-dienst-response", even
though the data is actually in different formats. This requires the
client to analyze the request (URL) in order to interpret the
data. Instead, the server should return distinct types, e.g.:

"application/dienst-services", or
"application/dienst; type=services", or even
"dienst/services".

As far as I can see the following distinct types are returned:

services - list of keywords
time - date & time as in RFC 1123
version - a version number
contents - list of bibligraphic records, seperated by an empty line
search - idem
formats - list of format records, *not* seperated by an empty line
(plus images and html)

Minor points:

I don't see what is "object oriented" about Dienst.

The example for UISearchIntMethod spells "Search" with a capital "S",
that should be "s".

The prototype implementation seems to use a different URL syntax from
the one given in the text.

One of the "related issues" in section 5 seems to point to distributed
servers ("Server registration"). Exactly how servers should relay
queries to each other is unclear to me. This probably needs additional
mechanisms, not present in the current Dienst protocol.

Regards,
Bert

PS. "Dienst" appears to stand for "Distributed Interactive Extensible
Network Server for Techreports", but I wonder if it is a coincidence
that "dienst" is the Dutch word for "service"?

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