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 …