Date: Wed, 9 Mar 94 16:41:18 -0600
Message-Id: <9403092241.AA13129@joe.uwex.edu>
To: "Mark P. McCahill" <mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu>, timbl@www0.cern.ch,
From: hoymand@joe.uwex.edu (Dirk Herr-Hoyman)
Subject: Re: The use of "?" in URLs
At 4:16 AM 3/9/94 -0600, Mark P. McCahill wrote:
>In message <9403091022.AA08523@ptpc00.cern.ch> writes:
>
>I think we are left with deciding if "?" should be mandaed as the seperator
>for search terms across all URLs. I can live with whateve the consensus for
>this is...
>
>..but, I'm trying to figure out how this would work with a URL for an SQL
>database server. Presumably, you would want to allow the user to enter search
>terms for several fields in the SQL database. Would that imply that you use
>"?" many times within the URL? How would you denote the field names for each
>of the fields that the user might enter n search terms for? I'm having a hard
>time seeing how the "?" conventn Tim is talking about will work with a URL
>pointing to a relational database; but an SL URL is something that would be
>nice to accomodate without breaking the general mandates of seperator formats
>for URLs.
>
In the HTML+ spec (28-oct-93, pp 34) I see a URL used to fill out forms.
The search part looks like
?name.x=2&name.y=29
This might work. In fact, won't we need something like this for ASK+ blocks?
I have seen some more complex syntax being thrown around on the Z39.50
list, but I'm not up to speed on it. Could someone in the know, like John
Curran, comment on whether there might be something there we could use?