OCLC deserves some REST
Hey Worldcat Identities you are doing awesome work–you deserve some REST. Why not use content-negotiation to serve up your HTML and XML representations? So:
curl --header "Accept: text/html" http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609
would return HTML and
curl --header "Accept: application/xml" http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609
would return XML. This would allow you to:
- not be limited to XSLT driven user views (doesn’t that get tedious?)
- allow you to scale to other sorts of output (application/rdf+xml, etc)
At least from the outside I’d have to disagree w/ Roy — it appears that institutions can and do innovate. But I won’t say it is easy …
September 26th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Yeah, I wonder if something like this is in the works since I noticed they did just recently change to more RESTful URIs for their identity records. At least I hope they go at it full on.
September 26th, 2007 at 7:35 am
The XSLT hasn’t been all that tedious, so I’m not particularly worried about delivering HTML. But, come the day that we want to deliver XML in other schemas, that’s exactly the mechanism we’ll use.